


Rage Against the Dying

by bearonthecouch



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Blood Magic (Dragon Age), Camp Nanowrimo, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Slavery, M/M, Magic, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition, Slavery, Tevinter Imperium (Dragon Age), The Fade, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-18 10:00:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29366670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bearonthecouch/pseuds/bearonthecouch
Summary: “Magic is dying,” Anders said. It had never been spoken so plainly, yet there it was.“How do you propose we stave off the end of the world as we know it?” Feynriel asked calmly.
Relationships: Anders/Feynriel (Dragon Age)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JayRain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayRain/gifts).



“Fasta vass!” Dorian cursed. He took a deep breath, and shook his head. Getting angry wouldn't do anything to help him. No matter how frustrating it was that he couldn't cast even the most simple spell, things he'd been able to do since he was four years old. Like light a fire in the fireplace. He tried again, stretching out his hand and concentrating, allowing the mana to flow through him and use the simple movements of his fingers as a guide to shape it, forming it to match his will. But the spell fizzled, as if it had hit an invisible wall, and no fire appeared. And Dorian cursed.

“What's wrong?”

Dorian turned to see a little girl standing in the doorway to his study. Her wavy brown hair tumbled to her shoulders and her bright eyes narrowed as she studied him with childlike concern.

He shook his head again, trying to clear his mind. “Nothing,” he said, although it was clear the little girl didn't believe him.

“Grownups always say nothing,” she protested. “They never mean it.”

Dorian sighed again. He wasn't sure how to explain that magic itself wasn't working. The girl, as of yet, had shown no sign of magical talent, and therefore wouldn't understand how fucking _lost_ he felt with his connection to the Fade flickering and weak. He'd been dosed with magebane before, and though this was less painful, it was no less disconcerting.

“I can't get the fireplace lit,” he finally said. It made him feel useless, to be completely honest.

“Oh, I can do it,” the girl said. She got down on her knees in front of the fire and touched a match to the kindling inside. After a few moments, the fire roared to life, and she tilted back her head. “It's easy, Dorian.”

Dorian couldn't help the smile that suddenly appeared on his face. He laughed aloud. “I suppose it is.”

“Will you play a game with me?”

“What kind of game?”

“Hide and seek!”

“Hide and seek, eh? But you always end up in the same spot, you know.”

The girl shrugged. “I _like_ the dining room. No one ever uses it, so it's a good place to hide.”

Dorian reached out to ruffle the girl's hair. He hadn't anticipated being so comfortable with children, yet Lexa Hawke never failed to make his mood brighter, whenever she came over to visit him in his sprawling Minrathous estate.

“I have to work,” he said to Lexa, and surprisingly, he actually sounded – and felt – disappointed about it. Or maybe not so surprisingly. His work as a member of the Magisterium was much more irritating than it was productive. But he had a lunch meeting scheduled with Maevaris Tilani, and Maeve, so far, had not shown herself to be the motherly sort. “Would you like me to walk you home?”

It was a long way through a big city from his large mansion to the soporati neighborhood where Lexa and her father lived. But Lexa shook her head. “I can go by myself.”

Dorian nodded. He trusted Lexa and he knew her father did as well. She had done much more dangerous things than walk home, in her short life. She knew better than to wander into the truly dangerous areas of the city. “Alright,” he agreed easily. “I'll see you next time, Lexa.”  
  
“Bye,” she answered cheerfully, already running out the door.

* * * *

“You wanna tell me how you got these?”

As Lexa pushed opened the door to her father's clinic, she saw that he was questioning a patient whose newly bandaged abdomen was still leaking blood. Lexa winced. It looked like it hurt a lot. She looked up at the patient, whose light hair, like her father's, was rare in Tevinter. His delicate features hinted at elven heritage, though anyone at first glance wouldn't mistake him for anything other than human. Lexa stood just inside the doorway, not exactly hiding, but not wanting to interupt.

“I... got in a fight,” the man said softly.

“I thought Tevinter was supposed to be a safe place for you,” Lexa's father said softly.

“It was – It is. I just... it was stupid. Trust me, Anders, it won't happen again.”

Anders said nothing – but he'd grown used to holding his tongue in Kirkwall's Darktown, and Tevinter was no different. “Why come to me?” While he waited for Feynriel to answer – if he was going to – he looked up to meet Lexa's eyes and he gave her a soft smile. Lexa smiled back, and waved. The greeting gave her permission to head deeper into the clinic, to the small desk situated in the back of the room where she did the schoolwork set for her by both her father and Dorian. Lexa didn't particularly _like_ the assignments they gave her, but she liked even less the disappointment they showed when she didn't do them. So she set to work writing out simple Tevene vocabulary. She was still much more comfortable with the native Ferelden Common she shared with her father, but the city all around her spoke a different language, so she had to learn it. She practiced her Tevene when she played with the neighborhood children, but their language was far different from the precise and proper diction of Dorian's books.

She could hear her father and Feynriel talking softly on the other side of the room. The lull of their voices was comforting as she began her work. She bit her lip as she concentrated on slowly pronouncing the words and sentences in front of her.

And then, the door to the clinic crashed open. Lexa jumped, and turned around in her chair so she could see the man standing in the entryway. He was dressed like a magister, and he certainly acted like one, storming into the place like he owned it and heading straight for Anders.

“Healer,” he growled.

Anders raised an eyebrow and held up his hands in a gesture of peace. “Do I know you?”

“I have heard stories of your work in this place.”

“Oh, good. My reputation precedes me.”

“I know who you are.”

Now, Anders's face darkened, and he crossed his arms over his chest.

“What do you want?”

“I need you to _fix_ me.”

“... Okay. What exactly is wrong?”

The magister's face moved from Anders's to Feynriel's, sitting on the cot. “I would prefer to speak alone.”

“Fine.” Anders pulled a curtain in front of Feynriel's cot and walked toward the far corner of the room, opposite Lexa's little desk. There was a table and chairs there. Anders nodded to indicate the magister should sit. The man's lip curled, but he finally did so.

“You don't look sick,” Anders prompted.

“I have unbearable headaches. Stomachaches. Nothing I have tried has worked to cure them.” That was putting it lightly. Lucio wasn't anywhere close to describing the times he woke up in the middle of the night, sweat pouring down his skin and vomiting uncontrollably. He didn't talk about the migraines that turned the world white and sent him to sit in a darkened room, breathing deeply, until they passed. Sometimes he lost consciousness completely, and in those blackouts, he dreamed of the Fade. He said none of that to the healer, but he had the uncomfortable feeling that the man knew it all anyway. At the very least, he was well aware that the magister was holding something back. Lucio shook his head, growling softly. “But that is not my primary problem.” Anders raised an eyebrow, asking the question non-verbally. Lucio's dark eyes bored into his. “ _Magic_ doesn't work,” the magister snapped. As though it were Anders's fault.

The healer nodded. Yes, he knew something about this. It was obvious to any mage. But he couldn't do anything about it, and even if he could, he had no incentive to help the magisters of Tevinter. Especially not this one. Magister Lucio's reputation preceded him as well: he was a cruel and petty man, absorbed in competition with his fellow magisters and rumored to be one of the accursed Venatori.

“There are some who believe the... disturbances with mana have something to do with the Breach,” Anders said calmly.

“I don't care why it's happening, just fix it!” Lucio yelled.

From her seat across the room, little Lexa jumped and curled up into a self-defensive ball. She didn't like this man. She didn't like him at all. His voice was hard and angry, and he seemed ready to hurt her father (or anyone who didn't listen to him, she supposed).

Her father, however, didn't seem to recognize the danger. But Anders had been in many more dangerous situations than this in his life. Perhaps compared to the Knight Commander of the templars, Lucio Jacaris wasn't frightening at all.

“Why should I help you?” he asked. Jacaris snarled, and his gaze flickered over to Lexa. She hunched down further, pretending to be intently studying the book on the table in front of her. Anders immediately caught where the magister's attention had fallen, and he shook his head immediately.

“Touch her and I'll kill you,” he snarled.

Jacaris smiled thinly. He reached out a hand, and pulled Lexa toward him. She fell awkwardly to the floor and slid toward him, bound by an invisible chain. So much for magic not working. “Daddy!” she shrieked.

“Shut up, girl,” Jacaris snarled. He hauled her to her feet and held her by the throat.

Anders's eyes flashed with rage, and he began moving his hand in order to call forth primal magic: fire or lightning or ice. It didn't matter which, because Jacaris shut it down with a simple mana drain.

And with his hand still around the daughter's throat, he stared at Anders, eyes narrowed, all scholar now. “Why does it work for _you_?”

In his hand, the little girl began to struggle. Jacaris hummed a note of interest and cast a paralysis spell, finger tracing the glyph in the air to hold her still. It seemed that as long as he remained in close proximity to the healer, his magic would work too.

“You will come with us, healer. Do not worry. I will not harm your child, so long as you _fix_ what is _wrong.”_

“I don't know why you think that I can do that!”

Lucio's put his hand on Lexa's shoulder and tightened.

“Daddy,” she whined, and her eyes were full of fear.

“Fine. Fine. I'll do whatever you want.”

Jacaris smiled.

Feynriel watched Anders and Lexa go, both of them pushed ahead of Magister Jacaris, and his stomach flipped. But he'd known Anders in Kirkwall, and knew that the man could take care of himself. He tested his bandages, which seemed to protect his wound well enough – he was no longer leaking blood, anyway. He took a few of the painkilling herbs Anders had pointed out to him off the shelf, and blew out the candles and firmly shut the door to the clinic on his way out.

He then made his way back through the city toward his own master, the magister who had taken him on as an apprentice when he first arrived in Tevinter years ago. The apprenticeship was difficult to say the least, but he did learn a lot. He'd been happy when Anders had come to the city, though. It was nice to have a friend who came from the same place he did. Not that they had a lot in common, what with Anders being a former Circle mage and a former Grey Warden, and then a criminal who'd ignited a holy war. A part of Feynriel figured he ought to be intimidated by the man. Most people were. But Feynriel had been in his dreams, and that tended to be a great equalizer.

* * * *

Lexa was both bored and scared at the same time, and it made her stomach flip. The room she was in didn't _look_ very scary. It looked a child's bedroom, and a nicer one than she had at home. The bed she sat on was big and soft. She curled up against the headboard, arms around her knees.

“Hello?” she said into the quiet.

Predictably, no one answered. After a moment, Lexa slid off the bed and padded across the large room. It was draped with heavy red and gold fabrics, from the tapestry on the wall to the bedspread. The door was locked; she had already tried to jiggle the handle. She looked around the room carefully taking in her surroundings. There were some toys on a shelf too high for her to reach – there to look pretty, not to play with. She wondered whose room this was. It felt like no one had used it in a very long time.

Her head snapped up as the lock clicked and the door began to smoothly swing open.

An elven girl who looked only a couple of years older than her slipped into the room. She was wearing a brown dresss and carrying a tray laden with food. She blinked with surprise at the sight of Lexa sitting on the floor. Lexa supposed she would be surprised too; there was a chair sitting in the corner, after all. She scrambled to her feet.

“Hi, I'm Lexa. What's your name?” She held out her hand, just the way Dorian had taught her in his lessons about etiquette.

The elven girl didn't shake her hand. “Good morning, miss,” she said instead. Her voice was soft and smooth, like flowing water. “I brought you something to eat.” She set the tray down on the desk opposite the bed, and smiled softly at Lexa.

Lexa _was_ pretty hungry. She walked over to see what was on the tray. The elven girl waited, quietly and calmly, with her hands held behind her back. “You can play with me,” Lexa said. She nodded toward the toys on the shelf. There were wooden horses up there, and a carriage they could pull. “I bet you can reach that shelf.”

The elf shook her head. “I can't, miss.”

“Okay,” Lexa said softly. Lexa wondered if she wasn't allowed to play because she was the magister's prisoner. Her father had told her to be good and do what she was told – which did not sound like him at all. “How old are you?” she asked the girl.

The elf looked back at the door, then turned to Lexa. She seemed to believe that no harm would come of answering Lexa's questions, and maybe she was afraid of making Lexa mad.

“I have ten summers, miss. And my name is Amaya.”

“I'm Lexa. It's nice to meet you.”

In Dorian's lessons, the other person always responded with 'It's nice to meet you too,' or something similar, but Amaya just glanced at the open doorway again and said. “I've work to do, miss. I'll be back to check on you later.”

She left the room as quietly as she'd entered and shut the door behind her.

Lexa took the tray of food over to the chair and sat down. There was some kind of meat in a chunky red sauce, along with vegetables and rice. A piece of bread sat to the side of the main meal, and a jug of watered wine had been provided for her to drink. It felt odd to be eating alone, usually she shared her meal with her father, talking and laughing. But she picked up the fork, and began to eat.

* * * *

Anders simmered with barely-contained anger. Lashing out at this man, right now, could be disastrous. He held Lexa hostage against Anders's good behavior. But Anders never has been good at doing as he's told.

He was already sickened by the thought of participating in a Tevinter magister's experiment. This lab, tucked into a forgotten corner of Jacaris's estate, was almost a caricature of exactly what the southern Chantry thought all Tevinter mages were like. It wasn't like there was blood dripping from every surface: no, the place was pristine. But the smell – and the _feel –_ of blood still hung heavy in the air.

There was a stone table in the middle of the room exactly the right size for some unfortunate person to be strapped down. There were bowls and containers of various sizes stacked carefully on the white marble shelves. And there were books everywhere, piled up and organized in some way Anders couldn't immediately figure out. On the floor and walls, golden runes gleamed in the dim light.

Anders licked dry lips and looked over his shoulder, where Lucio Jacaris waited with a cruel smile on his face. “What... what do you want me to do?”

“Oh, that is simple enough. You theorize that this... sickness of ours originated in the Fade? So that, I believe, is where we must go to cure it.”

“You want me to go into the Fade?”

“You have done it before. I have heard the tales of your southern Circles and their Harrowing.”

Anders nodded before he caught himself doing it. He nearly snapped his head to stillness once he realized that he was agreeing with a Tevinter magister about anything. “Still,” he said slowly. “It is not an easy thing. Nor a particularly safe one.”

Jacaris actually laughed aloud at that. It was far from a pleasant sound. “Something about you says you are not afraid of danger.”

As Anders watched, Jacaris poured a large decanter full of lyrium into an open bowl. That he had so much of the stuff ready surprised Anders, though he supposed it shouldn't have. He shook his head slightly, knowing – without knowing how he knew – that he wouldn't need the boost the lyrium provided to enter the Fade. He was strong enough to do it on his own.

“Have you been dreaming?” he asked, very quietly. He wasn't certain if he wanted Jacaris to answer. He wasn't sure if he wanted to be having a conversation with the magister.

“All mages dream,” the man said, unhelpfully. Anders nodded.

At Jacaris's insistence, he let his fingers skim over the bowl of lyrium – whether he needed it or not, it was here. He felt it was over him like cool water. It tingled over his skin. He took a deep breath, as though he was about to dive into the frigid waters of Lake Calenhad, and when he opened his eyes, the world around him was warped, and tinged with the haze of unreality. It had been a long, long time since he'd walked the halls of the Fade.

He looked for Jacaris, but if the man had also entered the Fade it was at a different point than Anders had. Anders knew that time and distance held different meanings in the dream realm. Perhaps Jacaris was close. Anders wondered if he needed the man to complete whatever ritual this was supposed to be. He had been given relatively little instruction. But this was an unprecedented situation. Nobody yet knew what steps to follow, if there was even a road.

He looked around at the curving garden pathways that had shaped themselves around him, and chose a direction at random. Right, then left, until he came to a... was it a window? Well, that was the closest comparison Anders could make anyway. The world around him was whisper-quiet as he approached the transparent square. Through it, he could see, not the marbled streets of Tevinter, but the wilder natural landscapes of Ferelden. The place looked familiar, though he couldn't yet name it. He took a step closer. _Haven_ , came the whisper on the wind, and Anders nodded.

It _was_ Haven. He took another step, and suddenly he was no longer looking at the source of the Breach that had torn the world asunder five years ago. He was _there._

There was no green rip in the sky anymore. That had been closed up by the Inquisitor all those years ago. Now, there was just a feeling. An emptiness. A lack. The Fade itself was the source of all magic but _here_? Here it was like a wall had been erected. Jacob Trevelyan had done more than repair a rip in the Veil. He had somehow managed to seal off magic itself.

Anders shook his head. No, he wasn't the expert Jacaris thought he was. What they needed wasn't _more_ power, but _old_ power. Anders needed to talk to the elves. He knew Jacaris wouldn't be happy. Tevinters always thought they were the best at magic. Going outside their pristine estates and gleaming halls to talk to the feral Dalish... the elves were _beneath_ them. That's why they were slaves.

Maybe... maybe there was some way to go back to the time of Arlathan. Jacaris was experimenting with time magic, after all. How did Anders _know_ that? It was yet another fact-thought that had appeared in his mind, crystal clear, without him having any knowledge of how it got there. But this time, he realized, it had to do with the golden glyphs he had seen in the magister's laboratory.

If they could go back to the time of Ancient Tevinter, of Arlathan, of the first magics, maybe _then_ they could find a solution to this problem.

 _“I can help you,”_ sang a velvet-smooth voice.

Anders smiled, and turned around. “I've been waiting for one of you to show up.” The demon grinned at him, all sharp teeth and glinting eyes. “Let me save you the time: I don't take deals from demons.” The desire demon pouted and draped herself over Anders's shoulder. He shrugged her off. “I'm not a horny teenager anymore. You're going to have to try a lot harder than that.”

“Do you think I do not know what you truly desire?” the demon hissed, her teeth close enough to Anders's ear to make him fear her biting.

With a ripple of white light, the demon changed form. “Anders, it's me,” said Callin Hawke's voice, and Anders sucked in a breath despite himself.

“You're not real,” he insisted. “You're not... you're not really her.”

“The dead too come into the Fade to find their rest.”

“To _rest_ ,” Anders repeated, clinging desperately to what he knew, what he had been taught, what he _believed_. “They do not wander. You... Cally, it's not really you.” He whispered the words like a prayer. But when he opened his eyes, she was still there.

“Get away, demon!” he yelled, thrusting his hand forward, with lightning coalescing around his closed fist. He opened his fingers and launched the energy forward. He threw it at the demon, and Callin's visage melted, quick as it had appeared.

“Oh, you're no fun!” the demon pouted, and Maker help him, it sounded like Isabela.

“Leave me alone, then.”

The demon laughed, and ran a finger lazily across the back of Anders's neck. “Oh, alright. If you insist.”

Anders blinked. Once. Twice.

Could it really be that a _demon_ had listened to _him_?

He took another deep breath, and walked forward. He tried to clear his head, but as he was in the realm of his own dreams, that wasn't really possible. He just knew that he couldn't get lost in here. That would be his doom.

As he had during his Harrowing, he concentrated on the linear path. One step, then the next. One task, then another. He knew what he had to do. He knew who he needed to talk to.

“Feynriel?” he asked, suddenly walking in through the thin bubble surrounding the younger man's dream. The space around him now seemed to resemble the Dalish camp on Sundermount. “Feynriel?” he called again. “Are you here?”

He'd only barely met the man in Kirkwall, and Feynriel had been little more than a boy, then. But he'd come searching Anders out when he was trying to establish his clinic in the soporati slums of Minrathous. Since then, they'd established a tenuous friendship. Anders knew that Feynriel had touched his dreams – it wasn't his fault: the younger man was naturally drawn toward people he knew. And in Minrathous, a city of thousands, he didn't know more than a handful of people. Anders had felt Feynriel's presence in his nightmares, a soft force attempting to counteract the worst of the dreams. They'd never talked about it in their waking lives, though.

Anders continued his trek through the camp. The elven inhabitants seemed not to see him or hear him. They worked and played, and there was a sense of peace and calm that had never been there when Anders had been there with Merrill and Hawke.

Anders was about to call out yet again, when Feynriel stepped out smoothly from behind an ara'vel. He smiled brightly, and did not look at all surprised to see Anders there.

“Can you hear me?” Anders asked, testing the rules of this dream world.

Feynriel nodded. “Of course I can,” he said simply. As if there were ever any doubt. Anders nodded too.

“You know the Fade better than any mage,” Anders said. He wasn't quite sure if it was a compliment or just an observation, or something in between.

But Feynriel seemed to accept the nebulous compliment.

“Perhaps,” he replied, as inscrutable as one of the Dalish.

“Magic is dying,” Anders said. It had never been spoken so plainly, yet there it was. The Breach had closed and sealed off the source of magic. Without water to feed it, even the most beautiful flower withered and died.

Feynriel did not disagree. “And do you truly believe we should ressurect it.”

Anders blinked. “Of _course_ we should!” He couldn't imagine a world without magic. If he wasn't a mage, then what was he? He knew the Tevinter magisters felt the same way. They were, perhaps rightfully, terrified of the world that might be coming. “I've spent my whole life fighting for freedom for mages,” Anders pleaded. That wasn't entirely true, but it had been true for as long as Feynriel had known him, and why quibble over small details? The man Anders was now was far different from the man he'd been in the Wardens, or the boy fleeing from the Circle years before that.

Feynriel held his gaze. He didn't blink or shuffle his feet or show any of the nervous tics that usually accompanied a normal person in a conversation. It unsettled Anders, who moved his hands to accentuate his comments and paced and spun as he thought.

“How do you propose we stave off the end of the world as we know it?” Feynriel asked calmly.

Anders sighed. “I think we have to go back to the start. To the source of all magic itself.”

“Arlathan. I can walk the halls of the Fade, Anders. That doesn't mean I can go back to a world that no longer exists.”

“But time moves differently in the Fade!”

“Have you ever tried to move forward or backward in time?”

“No. But that doesn't mean it can't be done! The Tevinters figured out how to do it.”

“Only for very small increments of time. And you and I are not privy to that research.”

“I... might be.” After all, Magister Lucio wanted his help. This was just a good reason for Anders to _want_ to help him. And if he wanted to help, maybe he could free Lexa from the man's clutches, send her to Dorian's to keep her safe.

“If that's true, why do you need me?” Feynriel asked, pulling Anders's thoughts back to the present conversation.

“Because there haven't been any other Dreamers since the ancient times. There's something special about you. I think you might be the key to this whole thing.”

Anders knew that Feynriel was apprenticed to another magister, a man named Clintus. No doubt he wasn't as free to wander off and do his own research as Anders might have wished. Yet, Feynriel was always at least half anchored in the Fade. He wouldn't be hard to contact.

“I will help you,” Feynriel agreed. “I will try to make your journey possible, at least.”

“Thank you, Feynriel. That's all I can ask.”

“Farewell, Anders.”

Anders opened his eyes, and returned to the world gently. That too was a gift that the Dreamer could provide. Lucio Jacaris was staring at him intently, his arms folded over his broad chest. Anders smiled sheepishly, and gave a little wave.

“Did you... were you in the Fade as well?” Anders asked.

The magister nodded. He said nothing else. Anders somehow knew better than to pry. If Jacaris had found the cure he was looking for, he certainly would have said so.

Anders rubbed at tired eyes. “Can I... can I see my daughter?” His voice shook with emotion as he asked. He didn't want to seem weak in front of Lucio, but there was no stopping it. To make up for it, he tracked the man's movements with an unblinking gaze. He forced himself to remain calm, to keep his arms still at his sides. He tried to mimic what he'd seen of Feynriel in the Fade.

Jacaris glared at Anders from beneath heavy brows. But he seemed to have reached the same conclusion Anders had: if there was an easy solution to his problem, if Anders had found it, he would have said so.

“Take him to the girl,” Jacaris said aloud, and a slave Anders hadn't noticed slipped out from the shadows. She was a young elven girl, maybe a year or two older than Lexa.

“Yes, Master,” she said softly, and then she beckoned Anders to follow.

She led him quietly through the gilded halls of Lucio Jacaris's sprawling estate. There were tapestries and paintings on the walls, surely expensive. Likewise, statues and artistic pottery sat on stands placed regularly throughout the halls and common rooms. It was the type of collection that a man bought to win the approval of others rather than through any true appreciation for the arts.

Just as Anders was starting to grow impatient, the girl stopped in front of a simple wooden door: dark wood, lacquered, and indistinguishable from any of the other doors they'd passed. She pulled a key from beneath her tunic and slid it into the lock. A click as it turned, and then she was pushing the door open.

“Daddy!” Lexa cried, before he'd even caught sight of her. She flung herself toward him, wrapping her arms around his waist. “You're here! Can we go home now?”

He shook his head, but did not disentangle her from his body. Instead, he hugged her close, breathing in the scent of her. Maker, he'd missed her. And how long had it been? A day? They'd been separated for longer than that before. She'd spent her early years in the middle of a _war_ , for the Maker's sake. There were times when Callin would take her and he wouldn't see her for many long months.

But since they'd come to Tevinter... a day apart meant something.

“We can't go home,” he told her. “But don't worry. I'll come see you every day.”

He didn't know if he could make that promise. A quick glance at the slave girl didn't tell him anything one way or another. But nothing in this world was going to keep Anders separated from Lexa for long.

Lexa finally pulled out of the hug, unable or unwilling to sit still for more than a few minutes.

“What have you been doing?” Anders asked her.

“Nothing,” she pouted. With one hand, she played with the amulet around her neck. She kept it the way that other children carried a security blanket. It had been a gift from her mother. Only Anders was aware of its history, and because of that he watched it warily, but so far, the amulet had been more protective than hostile.

“Well, I sort of made friends with Amaya,” Lexa said, tilting her chin toward the slave girl. “But she said she couldn't play.”

“Yeah,” Anders said softly. He hadn't gone into deep detail about slavery with Lexa. She knew that most of the elves in the city were slaves, and she'd seen the auction blocks in the city's markets. But the truth of it – the brutality of it – he had tried to keep hidden from her. “I'm sure … Amaya has a lot of work to do. But I can play with you, sweetie.”

He pulled down the toys that Lexa hadn't been able to reach. She smiled, and climbed up onto the bed. Anders sat down beside her, and the two of them maneuvered the horses for a while, Lexa laughing as Anders provided a soundtrack of clicks and whinnys. Amaya watched, still and silent. Her features twisted into a familiar expression: not quite jealousy, but _longing_. That's what it was. Anders had seen that look all the time on the faces of the apprentices of Kinloch Hold. Like him, this girl had had her childhood stolen.

Back in Kirkwall, more than a decade ago, Isabela had told him that everyone should be free, not just mages. Back then, he'd been too single-mindedly focused to really hear her, but now... Isabela was a good person, and smarter than anyone gave her credit for.

“Do you want to play?” he asked the elf girl, before he'd even really thought about the question. She shook her head, looking stricken. She _wanted_ to, that much was abundantly clear. But it was equally clear that she wasn't allowed to, and that she feared her master's response if he caught her doing so.

Lexa, who had always been empathetic, instantly picked up on Amaya's distress. She pushed her toy horses into Anders's hands. “It's okay, Daddy. We don't have to play.”

He put the horses and carriage back up on their shelf, and then returned to the bed, putting his arm around Lexa. Amaya looked on, her gaze every now and then flickering toward the door. Clearly, Lucio had told her to keep an eye on them, though providing only a ten-year-old girl as guard exhibited a surprising amount of trust, Anders thought. But perhaps Lucio thought – correctly – that the human healer wouldn't do anything that might endanger his daughter.

“So what should we do, then?” Anders asked. “If you don't want to play.”

“Tell me a story,” Lexa pleaded. Her father had the best stories. Sometimes they came from books – though he had them memorized – like the Adventures of the Black Fox. But most of his stories were true, things he had actually seen and done.

“What kind of story?”

“Tell me one about you and mama.” It was her usual request, though Anders had also told her plenty about his time with the Wardens, and even some of his escapes from the Tower, a decade before he had ever met Callin Hawke. But this time, he was happy to give in to her request.

“Did I ever tell you about the time when...” Lexa shook her head, snuggling up closer to him. Anders played with his daughter's hair, and talked, while she listened with wide eyes, her mouth forming a little o. She jumped at the good parts, making Anders laugh.

But after an hour, Amaya moved toward the door, indicating that Anders's time to visit with Lexa was up. He wondered yet again what might happen if he tried to resist. But he just brushed his lips gently over Lexa's forehead and told her to be good.

“I will, Daddy,” she promised.

And then he was gone.


	2. Chapter 2

Dorian sighed. He wasn't quite sure how exactly his name had become known among the soporati as the one who would listen to their pleas and attempt to solve their problems, or at least bring them before the Magisterium. Maevaris Tilani was his closest... he hesitated to call her friend, but coworker was too impersonal. Ally, perhaps? Partner? Anyway, Maevaris Tilani was the one he talked to, and in response she nearly always cast her vote along his lines in the Magisterium. The two of them together were inarguably the top leaders of the faction known as the Lucerni. And it was their goal to introduce change in Tevinter. To say that reform was not a popular idea was an understatement. Dorian and Tilani literally had to worry about assassins trying to kill them. But Maevaris was hard to intimidate. Dorian, despite all he'd done as part of the Inquisition and the crisis of the Breach, was still considered young and fool-hardy. Very few of his elders in the Magisterium took him seriously. So he needed Tilani's backing to have any chance of getting things done.

Their vote was coming up in the Senate chambers today, and Dorian had very slim hope of it passing. The magisters, from their place of power, would not see a need to ease the tax burden on the soporati by taking on more of it themselves. That they _had_ more money to be able to give in the first place seemed to matter very little to them. Even Maevaris and Dorian had money, though they kept their estates simple by the Magisterium's terms. Dorian's mother protested each and every one of the few times she came to see him at his home. He didn't even keep any slaves, a fact which had the other magisters whispering about him, behind his back and directly to his face. They tried to catch him in verbal traps, but the simple truth of it may have been exactly what they said: he had spent too much time in the South, and slavery no longer sat well with him, if it ever had.

He remembered Krem, whose father had been forced to sell himself into slavery when his business failed. If there were simple market protections, that kind of thing might not have to happen. Then there were the forced drafts and conscriptions of young men of prime age. Tevinter prided itself on the strength of its military, but that strength only came from cannibalizing its own people.

“Still, what other choice do we have, Pavus?” a grizzled old magister who should have retired from politics long ago growled. “Do we allow the Qunari to roll right over us, offer no defense whatsoever?”

Dorian chewed on his lower lip. After spending time with the Iron Bull, he felt differently about the Qunari, but he knew that for most of the men and women on this panel, they were still the monsters that haunted children's tales. And the Iron Bull had never suggested that his people weren't prepared to convert the whole of Tevinter to the Qun.

“No,” he said, in answer to the old man's question. “It's obvious we still need an army. I'm just proposing some of the magisters send their sons to fight.”

“That's-”

“Mages in other lands fight in their wars. They often can support large units in ways that those without magic simply cannot.” The scattered few laetans who'd willingly joined Tevinter's army had proven this fact.

“You mean they become human weapons?”

Dorian shrugged. “I fought plenty when I was a part of the Inquistion.”

There were those who looked down on him for his role in that Southern institution, but since he'd come back as an ambassador, there were plenty willing to claim that they'd sent him down to Ferelden on purpose, never mind that he'd found himself in a clash with the Venatori there. There was no way Tevinter was going to let something as large and world-altering as the Breach take place without forcing their way into it somehow.

“We're getting off track,” Tilani pointed out smoothly, and all eyes turned toward her. “This is a vote on tax rates. The composition of our military is another question for another time.”

Dorian cleared his throat softly and bowed his head, conceding to her point.

He let his eyes drift closed as he listened to the yeas and nays ringing out around him. Of course, the vote didn't go his way. He'd never expected it to. It still sent a surge of helpless anger rippling through him. Even the worst of the Inquisition's bickering had never felt as hopelessly deadlocked as this. There was just no way to get the Magisterium to see sense! They were too mired in ancient tradition, trapped by the lure of glory days long dead. He threw a sidelong glance at Maevaris, but she didn't show any sign of visible distress. Still, he was sure she wouldn't turn down a stiff drink if he offered.

“We go at it twice as hard next round,” Tilani assured him, as they sat across from each other in Dorian's parlor that evening, tumblers of whiskey in their hands. Dorian nodded. He glanced at the desk in the study behind him, piled high with letters from the city's common people, asking for his help – to save their families from slavery, to bring their sons home from the war, to keep their businesses afloat. That vote in the senate chamber was supposed to be the solution to all those problems.

Dorian rubbed at his forehead, where a vicious headache was flaring up. Maevaris narrowed her eyes at him, but despite that, he could tell she was sympathetic. He realized that he hadn't seen her use any magic in days. “Does it help?” he asked, as he struggled to fight off the pain. “If you cut yourself off?”

“Not especially,” Tilani replied instantly, confirming his suspicions.

“If we can figure out a solution to this magical drought, surely they'll have to listen to us.”

“Every magister in the city – in the _country_ , I'll bet – is looking for a solution.”

“Bleeding slaves dry in their desperation to find it,” Dorian muttered. The rumor mill that wound its way through the halls of the Magisterium said blood magic still continued to function. Blood magic. The oldest magic in the world, the first magic of the elves. Maybe the elves knew of some solution to this problem. They were slaves now, cut off from their old language and culture until most of that was lost to time, but there were still things they knew that the magisters didn't. Not that any of them except Dorian were likely to ever admit it. But he had an idea, anyway. A place to start.

* * * *

Dorian decided to start with the laetans, a bridge between the mages of the Magisterium and the soporati commoners who latched onto him for support, and help, in clawing their way upward in the dangerous world of Tevinter politics. The laetans had gained the most through the quirk of fate that allowed them to access the Fade as a magister could, and, therefore, they had the most to lose. They did not have the family backing that Dorian had, and in fact were mostly ignored by the important people. Some of them had made it into Tevinter's Circles, but even there, they had to fight for belonging. Feynriel, a laetan and a foreigner besides, was only one step up from a slave in the eyes of most Tevinters. Dorian did not know the young man, but Anders – the link between them – had told him of his incredible potential and unique magical art.

Dorian had watched jealously as Anders worked his magic without ever seeming to be interrupted or pained. It was like this... Fade sickness, whatever it was, did not affect him. Maybe that, too, was an angle on a solution. It was one he could circle back to later, perhaps the next time Lexa came to see him – Anders often sent her when the clinic was crowded and he didn't want to risk his daughter coming down with one of the many sicknesses that often swept through the slums. Mage children could often heal themselves, shaking free of those childhood illnesses without ever consciously realizing what they were doing. But Lexa, so far, had not shown herself to be magically talented, and therefore she was just as much at risk as any soporati child of catching measles or flu. But she was safe from this terrible migraine-inducing, gut-churning whatever-it-was that had the magisters up in arms. Like Maevaris, Dorian tried not to let on just how badly it impacted him. But the truth was, he hadn't eaten in days.

* * * *

It didn't often rain in Minrathous, but when it did, it was far from a gentle thing. Wind gusted through the trees and, often as not, ripped fruits from their branches and left them broken on the ground. Slaves were sent out into the downpours to try to rescue the figs and grapes and oranges.

It was the kind of day Dorian would have ordinarily have sent curled up in his study. But today, he had pulled a poncho over his head and set out to navigate the muddy streets as the rain pounded down atop his head. He wound his way through the nearly empty markets, where soporati businessmen too poor to own a sturdy storefront instead huddled inside their makeshift stalls and food stands. Only a few slaves hurried through the streets, on errands for their masters. The markets emptied out into the unpaved streets of the soporati neighborhood where Anders and Lexa lived. But Dorian bypassed those alleyways and instead took a sharp left, beginning the long uphill climb toward Minrathous's Circle. As with the Circles in the South, it was kept apart from the rest of the city. In Tevinter that was more to protect the sanctity of the mages' studies than out of any belief that the citizens needed to be kept safe from the mages and their risk of demonic possession. Nevertheless the separation remained, at least until the magisters' children finished their studies and returned to their parents' homes and neighborhoods.

When Dorian approached the tower, a slave opened the door for him, head down as he held the door and said, softly but clearly, “Welcome, Magister Pavus.”

Dorian met his contact in the library. She sat primly in a chair and watched him warily as he approached. He slipped into a chair across the table across from her. Even so, they were close enough to touch. It was not a large table.

“It's been a long time since I've been in this library,” Dorian said, by way of an introduction. It was a quiet, sheltered place. He could barely even hear the rain pattering on the roof. But then, the roof was several floors of tower above him, perhaps he shouldn't be surprised.

“I know who you are,” said the girl. She called herself Ana, though Dorian had no way of knowing if that was a shortened form of a long and properly Tevinter name, or a simple given name. She was a laetan, after all.

Dorian smiled, showing off gleaming white teeth. “I know who you are, as well, Ana Aclassi. And I believe you have a vested interest in helping the Lucerni achieve their goals.”

Ana's lips twisted into a pursed frown. “Why me?”

“You know I knew your brother.” Ana shrugged. She barely remembered Cremisius. She _didn't_ remember their father.

“What do you want?”

“I need you to whip up support among the children of the Circle. Get them to go home to mommy and daddy and convince them to vote-”

“For _Lucerni_ interests?”

“You of all people should try to understand what I'm trying to do.”

“Why? Because I'm a poor nobody?”

“ _Yes._ ”

“Fuck you, Dorian Pavus. I'm trying to make something of myself. I'm certainly not going to let you come in here and ruin it!”

Her voice softened toward the end of her tirade though, and Dorian knew it would be easier than he'd thought it might be to win her over. He leaned back in his chair.

“You know where to find me,” he told Ana simply.

And she didn't disagree.

* * * *

Lexa's little room had no window. It made it difficult to tell if it was day or night. She didn't remember falling asleep, but when her eyes opened, she was tucked into the too-large, too-soft bed. She rolled over, and a found a breakfast tray waiting on the small table next to her. She sat up, looking around, but no one else was in the room. She carefully picked up the breakfast tray and set it on her lap. There was fruit – bright melon balls of orange and green – and a croissant with a scoop of butter in a small dish next to it. This was obviously rich people food, but Lexa was hungry, so she took a cautious bite. She was still chewing when the door to her room was pushed open, whisper-quiet over the thick rugs that covered most of the floor.

Lexa's head snapped up, and she swallowed the last bit of food in her mouth, but it was only Amaya. She shut the door behind her and took her usual place tucked against the far wall. Lexa slid off the bed and grabbed the bowl of melons. “Do you want some?” she asked, holding the bowl out for Amaya to take.

Lexa had never really thought about money. Her family didn't have any, and she knew that. She and her father lived in the soporati slums. She'd gone days without meals throughout most of her childhood, because of the war, and because her father sometimes got wrapped up in things at the clinic and forgot they needed to eat. Lexa was old enough now to help take care of him, and sometimes that meant picking pockets or stealing small bits of food from the market stalls. She was a scrawny, underfed child growing up in a city full of them. But Amaya looked worse off than she did. She wasn't starving, exactly, but she looked down at Lexa's offering with wide eyes. Her head had already started to shake, an unspoken no. But Lexa wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. “Just eat a little bit,” she demanded. “Please.” Amaya wouldn't look at her. She shifted her feet nervously and glanced back toward the door. “You are hungry, aren't you?” Lexa prompted.

Amaya's hand shot out, quick as a snake, and took a bite of the fruit. She popped it into her mouth and swallowed, then grinned at Lexa (still not looking at her), amazed by her own daring. Lexa smiled, too. She took another bite of the croissant and nodded toward the bowl of fruit, urging Amaya to take another bite.

By the time the breakfast tray was empty, both girls were laughing. Amaya's giggles were tentative and uncertain, and Lexa was still laughing by the time she'd quickly returned to seriousness and begun cleaning up the breakfast tray and making the bed.

“You don't have to do that,” Lexa insisted. “It's not your mess.” She had been taught to clean up after herself, after all. Growing up in war camps did that to a person. Amaya very slowly let go of the bedsheets, and returned to the corner of the room, watching as Lexa smoothed out the blankets and tucked the sheets in tightly. Amaya gave a satisfied nod.

“Gratias tibi,” she said softly.

Amaya scooped up the dishes and slipped out of the room, leaving Lexa alone and bored. There wasn't anything to _do_ in here. At least she could've been out exploring the magister's estate, or even helping Amaya with her chores. She missed Daddy.

No one was hurting her, but it was obvious she was a prisoner, in a windowless room with a locked door. She sat down on the floor and leaned her head back, gently resting it against the frame of the bed. From here she could stare at the door, which didn't open, or see any other part of the room. It was a pretty big room, really.

She got up, and decided to do some exploring. It obviously wouldn't take very long. There wasn't even a closet or anywhere else to hide. There was no dust or anything, no fingerprints except her own. The whole place was pristine. But it had surely belonged to a child, once, before she came here. She wondered what it would be like to have Lucio Jacaris as a father. The man scared her. She knew Amaya was scared of him too. But her father wasn't. Anders wasn't scared of much, these days. He had been through too much, fought more than one war, and he would do anything to keep her safe. That made Lexa feel a lot better.

She looked under the bed first, but there was nothing there except the empty chamber pot. Then she explored the toys on the shelves – there were the horses and carriage, and a set of building blocks, and a cloth doll. She couldn't reach any of them, but the doll made her wonder if a little girl had lived here. What had happened to her? Was she all grown up now? Lexa hadn't seen anyone here except for herself, her father, Amaya, and Magister Jacaris. She certainly hadn't seen anyone that looked like a mother _or_ a daughter. They'd be human, like him, not an elf like Amaya.

The bedclothes were a deep red, trimmed with gold. That didn't prove anything. Sometimes girls like frilly pink things trimmed in lace, but a lot of times they didn't. Lexa didn't think she'd ever worn or owned anything pink in her entire life.

The only thing left was the desk, which had a drawer that slid out from underneath it. The drawer had a golden keyhole, and when Lexa tried to pull it open, it was locked. Lexa didn't have the key, and she didn't have anything that she could use as a lockpick either. Maybe Amaya would.

She sat against the foot of the bed again. Maybe there was a diary or something in that drawer. Lexa didn't keep a diary, but she knew lots of little girls did. Maybe, stuck in here, she would start. But the truth was, she got easily bored with reading and writing. She could listen to people tell stories for hours – her father, or Dorian, or when she was younger, before Tevinter, Uncle Varric – but _reading_... She ran out of patience for it. And that was in the language she _knew_. Most of the books around here were written in some form of Tevene. But if she had paper, she might draw. Her father drew pictures all the time, and he was really good at it. Lexa liked to draw too. Most of the time she drew the adventures of their cat, Alley. Alley was an orange-striped tabby who was a little too fat. She liked hiding under the furniture most of the time, and she constantly sought attention from Lexa or the visitors to the clinic. With no one home to feed her, Alley would wander the tangled backstreets that had given her her name, hunting for meals on her own. Lexa hadn't seen any animals in this place either.

The next time the door opened, Lexa sat bold upright, waiting for Amaya. The elf girl came in as quietly as ever, and she sat another food tray down on the small table. Lexa's stomach growled softly. Had the whole day passed already? Was the sky darkening toward night, outside her little room?

It had been late afternoon the previous day when her father had come to see her. “Where's my daddy?” she asked Amaya. The elf girl just blinked. Of course. What made Lexa think she would know? “I want to see him,” she cried, and her voice sounded high-pitched and whiny, but she hardly cared.

Amaya glared at her, and Lexa took a shaky breath. She _wasn't_ a baby. She was a big kid, and she wasn't going to fall apart.

She took the cover off the food tray, revealing meat and potatoes and some kind of leafy green vegetable. She ate hungrily, but saved some for Amaya. She'd assumed the elven girl had meals of her own when she wasn't with her, but maybe she'd been wrong. “You get to eat, don't you?”

Lexa hated how ignorant the question made her sound, but she was trying to resolve what she knew of slavery in this city with the living, breathing person in front of her now.

“Of course I do,” Amaya said flatly. “Rarely meat, though.”

“You can have mine.”

Amaya nodded, since she'd shared the girl's breakfast that morning and was therefore expecting the offer. But she didn't want to owe this girl anything. “Are you a mage?” she asked, and then she bit her tongue, her breath caught in her lungs. She'd been taught years and years ago not to speak unless spoken to.

But Lexa seemed not to notice her momentary distress. She shook her head, still smiling. “No. I mean, maybe just not yet. My daddy told me he didn't do any magic at all til he was eleven. But I don't think I _want_ to be a mage.”

“Why not?” Amaya asked, wide-eyed and slightly disbelieving. Who would _choose_ to be a poor soporati? Magic could buy you freedom, power... if Amaya could be a mage... Amaya wanted very little, but she wanted magic.

“If you're a mage, you have bad nightmares all the time. Because the demons try to possess you while you sleep.” Lexa had nightmares too, most of them revolving around her mother's death and the horrors she'd seen during the war. Most of her memories of that time weren't very clear. When she dreamt, she couldn't even tell what was real and what wasn't.

“I don't _care_ ,” Amaya said. “I'd learn how to fight them.”

* * * *

“The girl is docile enough?” Overseer Antonius asked. Amaya nodded. “The Master will be pleased.”

A flush of pleasure spread through Amaya. It wasn't exactly praise, but it was closer than she usually received, and she knew she was doing her assigned task well. Even if it _was_ only babysitting. She knew that Master would only be truly pleased once he'd gotten the healer to fix whatever was wrong with him. Not that the slaves were supposed to know that anything was wrong, but it was hard to hide anything when you constantly relied on others to fulfill your every need. The Master was sick.

At first, he'd assumed it was poison – a usually safe assumption in Tevinter – and he'd punished the cook near to death. He wouldn't have cared if the cook _had_ died, but slaves had their own ways of healing, and they'd nursed her back from the brink. Other slaves weren't so lucky. In the days since then, Master had bled nearly a dozen of them dry to feed his blood magic rituals, his own attempts to cure himself. It left the rest of them scrambling to do the work of a dozen men, but Master would certainly buy a handful of new slaves whenever he was no longer distracted by the affliction the mages of the city were calling a sickness of the Fade.

Amaya knew little about magic, and feared it in the hands of a man as openly cruel and capricious as Magister Jacaris. She feared Antonius nearly as much. He was no mage, but he was the hand that fulfilled Master's will, the hand that held the whip, the man who brought the slaves from the market and broke them in.

Amaya had heard rumors that life in this estate was not always so terrible. Her mother remembered when Lucio's wife and son had still been alive. He had been less brutal and heavy-handed then. Amaya's mother had never forgotten her place, but back then, she had felt almost a part of Jacaris's family. Now, she only felt like a whore. She was ashamed of what she was forced to do, and as much as she wished there was a way, she could not hide it from her daughter. Slaves knew too much, there was no lying to one another. Staying closed-lipped, sure, and Enna did, but Amaya was intelligent and perceptive because it was essential to her survival.

She was nearing the age where she might be sold. Enna had been creating a distance between them, pushing her away, preparing her daughter for the separation that felt inevitable.

And now there was this little girl here in the estate, this human girl that Amaya had been put in charge of. Enna knew her daughter knew better than to get too close. At least, that's what she hoped.

* * * *

Lexa was laying on her stomach on the bed, pushed up on her elbows, looking over at Amaya. The elven girl was standing in her usual spot, watching Lexa unblinkingly.

“Are you like a spy?” Lexa asked.

“Yes.” It was true. She reported Lexa's behavior to Overseer Antonius every day, and he in turn reported it to Master Jacaris. But it's not like the human girl ever did anything truly worth reporting. She was predictable, an eight-year-old girl who hadn't left a single room in days. She was bored.

“I brought a game,” Amaya said. She set a leather pouch onto the bed.

Lexa picked it up, her brows furrowed in concentration. “Marbles?” she asked, as she dumped the hardened clay balls into her hand.

“For each one you claim, you may ask a question.”

Lexa smiled, and nodded her understanding of the rules.

They set up the play area in the center of the room. Amaya had also brought with her a stick of chalk for drawing the circle.

Lexa kept one of the larger marbles, a shooter, in her hand, and dumped the rest onto the floor before pushing them into Amaya's circle. Amaya took the other shooter, and nodded toward Lexa.

“You go first,” she told the younger girl.

Lexa lined up her shot, easy early in the game, when there were so many marbles in the ring, and she knocked three out past the edge of the circle. She raised an eyebrow at Amaya, wondering if she'd really meant what she'd said.

“Three questions,” Amaya confirmed.

“Do you have a mama?” Amaya nodded, her eyes focused on the marbles scattered across the floor rather than on Lexa. The human girl felt a twisted knot of jealousy and longing in the pit of her stomach, and she hurried to her next question. “Do you have nightmares?”

She did, too often, and so did her father. Dorian had never explicitly said so, but she knew he did, too. He was a mage, after all.

“Yes,” Amaya said, very softly. But she left it at that. She didn't tell the human girl her real fears. She likely wouldn't understand them anyway. She held her shooter in the palm of her hand and ran her thumb over its smooth surface.

Lexa clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth and then asked her third question. “Do you like living here?”

* * * *

Anders stretched and paced around Magister Jacaris's unsettling laboratory. He knew they would need more power than they had to do what they needed to do. So far, at least, he had been able to convince Jacaris to let him access that power via lyrium rather than blood. But lyrium wasn't an inexhaustible resource.

He sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. He looked over his shoulder at Jacaris, who sat stiffly on a straight-backed wooden chair, looking through a book from the stack on the floor next to him. Anders knew he was looking for glyphs or resources or rituals that they could use to crack the time travel research of the Venatori. Jacaris _is_ Venatori, but he hadn't been part of the strike team that had inserted themselves in southern Thedas to infiltrate the Inquisition. And all of those were dead now.

“I may be able to talk to...” Anders trailed off, not sure if it was safe to drop names to Lucio Jacaris.

“Dorian Pavus,” the man filled in, and Anders blinked. “Well, he was the only one who was there,” Jacaris pointed out, and Anders nodded. He should have known better than to underestimate the man's intelligence. “He won't help us,” Jacaris said flatly.

Anders nodded. He'd known that too.

Without waiting for permission, Anders poured a decanter full of lyrium into the shallow bowl that stood waiting for it. He skimmed his fingers through the liquid blue, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, it was to see the familiar gold-green pathways of the Fade.

He wandered slowly from stepping stone to stepping stone, feeling the wind carressing him as he walked. He was in a between-space, not anchored to any particular time or place. He closed his eyes and listened, and soon began to hear warped voices. He opened his eyes immediately, dropping into a ready stance, prepared to defend himself from any demons that may attack. They were circling close. He could feel them. Anders blew out a breath and slowly counted, in his head. Down from ten to one, then up and down again. The numbers kept him calm.

 _“Fuck you!”_ he heard the boyish voice shouting. He could almost feel the ache of bruises on his arm, where he tried and failed to get out of the templar's tight grasp. The man lifted a hand to hit the boy, and Anders flinched. He was watching a memory, yes, but perhaps this was a clue. Perhaps he could step back _into_ the memory, step back into time. There was no barrier between him and the child. He took one step closer and then another. The Fade twisted around him. His vision shifted. He was no longer looking in at the child; he _was_ the child. Another test, then. Was it possible to change the memory?

The templar's gauntleted hand slapped his cheek, the metal of his armor drawing blood. Anders lifted his hand to his face and glared daggers at the helmeted man.

Another templar pushed open the closed door that had just appeared in front of them, and Anders was shoved roughly into the Knight Commander's office. Greagoir was standing just under his arrow-slit window, silhouetted by the bright sun, looking properly commanding.

Anders felt the little boy in him ready to fight, but he took a deep and careful breath, and opened his mouth. If he _couldn't_ change the memory, he'd curse and spit at the leader of the templars, earning himself another slap, a punch to the gut, and a Smite just to put him in his place. But no sound came from him, until he carefully formed the words: “Knight Commander, I need your help.”

* * * *

“I did it,” Anders gasped, as he came back to full consciousness in Jacaris's laboratory. The magister sat with his stack of books, but he did at least look interested in what Anders had to say. “I went back in time!” He was grinning, pleased with his successful experiment, but Jacaris just stared at him with one raised eyebrow, quickly deflating Anders's mood. Still, there was a reward waiting for him.

The young elven girl who had escorted him to Lexa days before stood waiting just inside the door to the lab. Anders hadn't noticed her presence at all. She was quiet as a ghost. “Go see your daughter,” Jacaris ordered. Anders didn't need to be told twice.


	3. Chapter 3

Lexa threw herself into Anders's arms, and he picked her up and held her on his hip, even though she was really much too old to be carried in such a way. Her grin was bright, and he matched it with his own.

“I missed you, Daddy,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Me too, baby,” he murmured into her hair. “I missed you, too.”

He set her down on the bed and then sat down next to her. Amaya watched from her familiar position across the room.

Lexa lay on her back, flung dramatically over the huge bed. “Daddy, I'm bored,” she whined.

“I know.” Neither of them had left the rooms they'd been stuck in for more than a week. Anders at least had a project to work on. “What've you been doing to keep yourself entertained?” he asked her. He ought to ask Jacaris if she could get some books or something.

“I play with Amaya sometimes.”

“Oh. That's nice.” Anders was glad that the young elven girl was acting as somewhat of a friend to his daughter, but he wondered what had changed between now and her earlier assertion that she couldn't play.

“Daddy.” Lexa sat up, searching Anders's face, suddenly serious. “When do we get to go home?”

* * * *

Anders slept on a cot tucked into the corner of Jacaris's laboratory, which was locked whenever the magister wasn't in it. He had barely more freedom to move than his daughter. He sat bolt upright as soon as he heard the heavy door to the large room creaking open. The truth was, he hadn't been sleeping well lately. Ever since he'd begun his reluctant partnership with Lucio, dipping into the Fade, his dreams had been sharper, brighter, and more disturbing. Sometimes he could feel Feynriel's touch, attempting to bleed out the worst of his fear, but the younger man was always gone before Anders could talk to him. Anders reached for the basin on the table next to him and splashed the cold water inside onto his face. He tried to comb his fingers through his tangled hair, but Lucio still frowned when he looked at him. “I'll have a bath drawn for you,” he determined.  
  
“Thank you,” Anders said quietly. He looked the magister over. Lucio didn't look like he'd slept any better than Anders had. Anders stomach growled softly – he may not consider himself to be a Grey Warden anymore, but the Blight still lived within him and the constant hunger that was a side effect of the Joining had never gone away. But Jacaris was too pre-occupied to eat. When a slave slipped into the room, silent as a shadow, and set two breakfast trays down on the table, Lucio ignored her. But he tilted toward the door the slave had just exited, indicating that Anders should follow her.

Anders sank into the provided tub and sighed happily, despite the awkwardness of the situation. The warmth of the water relaxed his body, though it did nothing to ease the stresses that preyed on his mind. Another slave came forward to wash him, but Anders gently shook him off, taking the cake of soap and sliding it over his own skin. The bathwater grew dark as he scrubbed off days' worth of dirt and grime. He bathed as quickly as possible and was forced to wear a decadent robe provided for him by the slave, as his own simple tunic and breeches had been taken away to be laundered. Once he had dressed and allowed himself to be led back to Lucio's laboratory, the magister was already deep in the middle of some ritual.

A swell of rage surged up in him when he saw the dead slave, dark blood coagulating around his torn open neck, still warm. He charged toward Magister Jacaris, whirled him around, and had nearly drawn back his fist to punch him before he felt the screaming firework in his mind that sent him staggering backward. He landed on his ass, Lucio's mind blast still ringing in his head.

“I said no blood magic!” Anders panted, as he struggled to get to his feet.

Lucio, his fingers still sticky with the slave's blood, raised an eyebrow. “Have a care, healer. You have no standing to make demands of me.”

Anders hung his head and clenched his hands into tight fists, knowing Jacaris was right. Besides the fact that the magister still held his daughter hostage, the uncomfortable truth of it was that the slave was already dead. Perhaps his death might mean something if his blood could lead them one step closer to the goal. Yet Anders refused to be the one to use it. It wasn't that he was squeamish. He dealt with blood every day. But blood magic was a line he'd demanded that he would never cross, ages ago in a totally different world, when he was just a teenager alone in a solitary cell.

“What was his name?” he asked quietly.

For a moment, he assumed Jacaris hadn't heard him. But then the magister locked eyes with him, and frowned. “What?” he asked, and even in that one word his voice was sharp and dangerous.

“The slave you just murdered,” Anders demanded. “What was his name?”

Jacaris roiled with anger that Anders could feel, and he almost feared that the magister would strike him, but Lucio simply took in a slow breath and then let it out. “Tyrol,” he said, in answer to Anders's question, and though his voice was steady, Anders thought he could feel a hint of sorrow emanating from the man.

Anders gave a reverent nod. Tyrol's eyes were already closed, and except for the bloody wound at his throat, he had been lain to rest almost gently. Anders closed his eyes and whispered a prayer, though he doubted an elf from Tevinter would draw any comfort from his Andrastein words. Then he grabbed a vial of lyrium and downed it, along with another one for good measure, and he sagged onto his cot and allowed himself to fall into the Fade.

As before, he allowed Kinloch Hold to be his anchor. The Tower formed itself around him more quickly this time. As he wandered the familiar halls, a sense of urgency overtook him, and before he could reach his destination, Knight Commander Greagoir rounded a corner and stopped just in front of him. The two men stood eye to eye, and this fundamental difference from his childhood days proved more than anything else that this world wasn't the one he knew, as if the warping at the edges of his vision weren't enough to do so.

“I've been looking for you,” said Greagoir. He wore no helmet, and his steel grey eyes met Anders's while he wore a soft smile on his face. Anders was certain it was the first time the Knight Commander of the templars had ever smiled at him. This man was older than even the Greagoir Anders knew. That he had survived the mage-templar war was something of a miracle, that he hadn't lost himself to lyrium addiction spoke even more of his strength of will. “Waiting for you, perhaps more accurately.”

Anders frowned. “Do you... remember, the last time we met?”

“We shared a dream. It is the first time a mage has ever touched my mind in such a way. I had no idea you possessed the skill.”

“I don't,” Anders said. “I mean, not really, I just...” He shook his head. “Never mind, it's not important.”

“You said you needed help,” Greagoir reminds him.

“This is going to sound crazy...” Anders admitted, but at Gregoir's urging, he followed the man into his little office and began to tell the story.

* * * *

Amaya came twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, to bring Lexa food and to empty the chamber pot. Sometimes she was able to stay and play, or at least talk. But most days, it seemed, she had urgent tasks elsewhere that stole her away from Lexa, leaving her alone in the room. This morning, she was trying and failing to push her finger into the little keyhole in the desk, when Amaya came into the room. She whirled around, trying not to look guilty as Amaya set the tray down. But she had a feeling Amaya knew what she'd been trying to do anyway.

“Here,” Alexa said, pushing her plate of toast and bacon and eggs and fruit to Amaya, who had long ago stopped protesting such actions.

Lexa had stopped trying to count the days she was stuck in here. She hadn't been outside or even looked out a window since she'd arrived. Her father at least got to walk around the magister's estate, didn't he? Maybe she could ask him, next time he came, to walk with her. Maybe they would let her.

With that plan now cemented, Lexa felt a new burst of energy. Amaya noticed – not much got past her – but she didn't say anything. Though it was obvious that Lexa was planning something, it didn't seem to be anything bad. She left Lexa's room as quietly as she'd entered, and she made her way over to the kitchen. She kept her eyes open for Overseer Antonius, but he wasn't in any of the dimly lit hallways she navigated. And anyway, she wasn't doing anything _wrong_. Not that that mattered to him. Antonius was just as cruel as their master, and had been known to punish a slave for having an attitude based on the look on their face or the pace of their steps. Amaya breathed a little easier when she didn't see him.

The kitchens were bustling, the slaves preparing for Master's luncheon. He was having guests, a few of the other magisters. Amaya peeked carefully into the dining room and saw Lexa's father, Anders, sitting at the table next to Jacaris. She quickly shut the door and took her place in the kitchen. All but the youngest slaves were working, most of the girls in here, while their brothers labored in the garden or tended to the master's horses.

Amaya's younger sister Raiya, who was nearing six years old, kneaded dough to make bread – that would be for later, it took far longer than half an hour to make a loaf of bread, Amaya knew. The lunch Master would eat consisted of a salad of fruits and vegetables, most of them fresh from the gardens Jacaris kept in memory of his late wife. There was also fish, brought in from the markets, and of course, some of Master's best wine. Amaya was still considered too young to serve a meal, unless you counted bringing in Lexa's tray each day. She was glad enough for it, it would keep her out of Master's eye. But the woman in charge of the kitchens, Lani, had worked for Jacaris for decades. She took no nonsense and often wielded a wooden spoon to ensure that the other slaves under her command did nothing to get themselves or her in trouble. She clicked her tongue in Amaya's direction, and gestured for her to come over. Amaya set down the grapes she had been washing and walked over to the woman old enough to be her grandmother. Lani put a salad bowl into her hands. “Take that into the dining room,” she ordered.

“But-”

“It's work that needs doing, and you can do it.” Her tone of voice was laced with warning. Amaya swallowed hard, but took the door and did what she was told.

The dining room had been dimly lit every other one of the rare times when Amaya had been inside it. Now, the heavy drapes over the windows had been pulled open, allowing sunlight to stream through. A large wooden table took up most of the space. Master Jacaris sat at the head of the table, with Anders at his right hand. His visitors – three magisters, two men and a woman – circled the opposite end of the table. There were several empty seats at the table, but that wasn't unusual. Often, Master Jacaris dined by himself.

Amaya gently set the large bowl on the table in front of her master, than tucked herself against the wall the way she had seen her mother and the other slaves do during meals. The way she used to do in Lexa's room, ready to respond to an order but otherwise invisible.

Jacaris took the salad tongs and served himself, then offered the bowl to Anders, who took it and put a similar amount of food on his plate. Anders only had to reach a little bit to put the bowl into the nearby female magister's hands. Lani came out of the kitchen a few moments later, ready to serve the fish. She put the largest and most succulent serving on Jacaris's plate first, then went around the table before bowing and retreating back into the kitchen with her empty serving dish. Jacaris raised an eyebrow, and Amaya could feel the weight of his attention on her. Her eyes flitted over his empty wine glass. Amaya held her breath, but picked up the wine from the table. She handed it to her master, allowing him to be the one to open it, to make an impression on the guests after bragging for a minute on the vintage and the wineries his family owned out of the city. When he was finished, and had gestured with a short nod, Amaya poured the wine.

She was being as careful as she could, but her hands were shaking, and the wine spilled as she was filling Anders's glass. It rapidly spread over the white linen tablecloth, staining it deep and dark as blood. She quickly righted the wine bottle, setting it down gently away from the stain. There was no mistaking the look of anger – red-faced rage – on Lucio Jacaris's face. Anders obviously caught it too, and so did the three other magisters, who looked back and forth between them but said nothing.

“It was just a mistake, Ser,” Anders said calmly. He reached over the soiled puddle of wine soaked into the tablecloth and made some quick movements with his hand while muttering some words under his breath. The stain disappeared, as if it had never been there at all. “See? No harm done.”

Amaya was used to magic – you couldn't have been born in Tevinter and not be – but it was still amazing to see Anders's simple parlor trick. Or maybe she was simply shocked that the man appeared to be trying to help her.

Jacaris pretended not to see the spell taking place in front of him. “Come here, girl,” he growled. Amaya took one step forward, then another, moving as if pulled forward, in a grip she couldn't break free from. She _was_ being manipulated, she could feel Jacaris's will heavy on her mind. As soon as she got within an arm's length of him, he slapped her across the face, with enough force that Amaya feared losing her teeth. She couldn't stifle the cry that escaped her lips. Jacaris, for his part, acted like nothing had happened.

Amaya raised a hand to her cheek, trying to ease the stinging burn of the slap, but she was still held fast by Jacaris's will. None of the other magisters said a word – Jacaris was well within his rights to discipline his slaves however he saw fit, after all, and they were here to have a very different conversation.

Anders slid himself in between Jacaris and Amaya, shielding her with his body. “You've made your point,” he hissed. Jacaris's eyes flickered up to his and he raised an eyebrow.

“You are a _guest_ ,” he warned.

Anders looked over his shoulder at Amaya before turning back to Jacaris. “Leave her alone. She's just a child.”

He actually sounded pained, Amaya thought. Like he actually cared about what happened to her.

Amaya looked at him and waited, though she wasn't sure what she was waiting for. Protection, maybe. Or orders.

“Get out,” Jacaris snarled. Amaya thought he was talking to her, and she was ready to leap to obey. But Anders nodded, and she realized her master was talking to _him_. “Go with him, girl,” came the second command. There was still anger in his voice, the kind that made Amaya all too glad he was ordering her away from him. She wouldn't necessarily be safe forever, but she was safe for now.

Anders walked the halls like he knew them. Maybe he did. “Do you... go walking around a lot?” Amaya asked softly. What was she _doing_ , talking to a foreign mage like they were equals? “Why did you help me?” she added.

Anders didn't answer until they'd come to the room where his daughter waited. Amaya slipped the key, on its cord around her neck, out from underneath her tunic. She slid it into the lock and turned it until she heard the satisfying click. She pushed the door open and held it for Anders.

Lexa was sitting on the bed, alert and ready for Amaya to come in. Her face bloomed into a bright grin as soon as she saw her father. But she studied Amaya too. “What happened?” she asked, reaching out to run her fingers over Amaya's already-bruising cheek. The elven girl pulled away before the human could touch her.

“I'm fine,” she said, which was basically true. After a moment, and a searching glance at her father's face, Lexa nodded.

“Daddy can we go outside?” she asked.

He grinned. “You coming?” he asked Amaya.

She smiled softly, and followed the two humans.

* * * *

Amaya had never had a father that she knew anything about. Clearly, he'd been an elf, whoever he was. She knew – or had her suspicions anyway – as to the paternity of her human-looking youngest siblings (all she'd ever had were half-siblings, but this was not unusual for slaves). She watched Anders and Lexa together, and there was no quelling the jealously that rose up inside her like a rabid animal. There were plenty of things that free people got that slaves didn't, but _family_ was perhaps the one that Amaya wondered about most. What kinds of bonds held people together that strongly?

Anders took Lexa wandering through the gardens and courtyards, where slaves worked at harvesting the summer crops or hanging up the washing. Her younger siblings wandered over, looking at her quizzically, wondering what she was doing or wanting to play. She shook her head, and continued keeping an eye on Lexa and her father. If she let either of them slip through her grasp, Amaya wasn't exaggerating when she thought that Jacaris might kill her. But neither Anders nor Lexa seemed inclined to cause much trouble. Lexa lay on a stone bench in the garden, her head on her father's lap. She was giggling uncontrollably as he tickled her. Amaya's belly flipped, and she bit her lower lip. It felt like smiling would be a betrayal of her situation. The children she knew didn't get to have that kind of pure and carefree happiness. They were always worried. Amaya had thought that Lexa was often worried too, but maybe that was only when she was stuck inside, separated from her family.

She half wondered if Anders or Lexa would try to run, what she would do if they did. But once they had been outside for an hour or more, and Amaya figured that Master's guests would be leaving any time, she put her hand on Lexa's arm and started to steer her indoors. Lexa resisted, turning to her father for help, but Anders just shrugged and followed behind Amaya, letting her lead the way.

Once they were back inside the estate, Amaya pushed Lexa in front of her, letting her walk freely. She locked her in the bedroom, and then she delivered Anders to Master's laboratory. The darkness and the scent of blood in this corner of the house made her shiver. She rubbed at her cheek again, unconsciously.

“I'm sorry,” Anders said quietly, seeing the gesture. Amaya shrugged. It just was what it was. “Do not think it goes unnoticed that you have become a friend to my daughter.”

Amaya studied Anders, daring to look him in the eye. It was only briefly, true, but it was more than she would have risked with any other human. Was he offering to help her, or was that only her desperation twisting free?

* * * *

Enna watched Amaya sleeping, late that night. She smoothed her daughter's hair gently, and hummed an old lullaby softly, under her breath. Amaya barely stirred.

Enna was worried about her daughter. She was proud of her, but worried. She had seen her shift in attitude since she'd been put in charge of that human girl. Where once Amaya had been shy and careful, hurrying to perform her duties and rightfully frightened of the wrath of those above her, now she was... different. She had never directly disobeyed any of their master's orders, had not talked back or resisted when given a command. But there was defiance in her all the same. She wasn't a child anymore. She had not yet had her first blood, but it was coming, and Enna knew Master was far more likely to sell her than to keep her. She tucked herself in close to Amaya and resolved never to take her presence for granted, to see her, and love her, while she was here. She kissed Amaya's temple, her lips brushing softly over her daughter's skin. Amaya shifted in her sleep, pulling out of Enna's reach.

* * * *

Master's bedroom was dark, with the heavy drapes over the windows pulled shut and no lamplight glowing, as no one was currently in the room. Amaya had never been in here before, but she was certain no one else was around: Master wouldn't be sleeping in the middle of the day, and the slaves who slipped in to clean and tidy the room were working at other tasks. Amaya had made sure of that.

She crept past the massive four-poster bed to the heavy night table next to it. The drawer slid open easily when she pulled on it, and she looked down at a deep rectangle full of Master's possessions: everything from a couple of small books to a folded up scarf to a few valuable jewels, some set into rings and others simply wrapped up carefully and left in the drawer. Amaya knew, even if she couldn't feel it, that at least some of those crystals carried magic. But she ignored all of those, and quickly reached out to grab the heavy gold key that Lexa needed. She wrapped it tightly in her hand, since her clothes didn't have any pockets. And then she heard footsteps behind her. She whirled around, and her heart leapt into her throat. But the shadow in the doorway was small, its owner younger than her.

“Xari,” she hissed. “What are you doing here?!”

“What are _you_ doing here?” her younger brother echoed. He glared at her, and Amaya knew that he'd followed her.

“I mean it,” she demanded. “Get out of here!”

“Only if you do, too,” Xari said stubbornly. He may be only seven, but that was plenty old enough to understand what she was risking, just being in this room.

“Okay,” Amaya agreed readily. After all, she'd gotten what she came for. She moved to follow Xari but in her haste, she wasn't paying attention to what she was doing, and her elbow bumped the ceramic vase of the top of the night table. It tilted on the edge of the piece of the furniture, and then crashed to the floor.

Xari's mouth formed an o, and his eyebrows lifted. His shock sent a shiver through Amaya, and she had to take in a sharp intake of breath before she started crying. Xari turned and ran, leaving her alone with the mess she had created.

* * * *

Amaya, Anders, and Lexa were sitting in the bedroom, their bodies creating a rough outline of a circle, or a triangle, on the floor. Anders scooted over so that he could hold Lexa close, and she leaned against the knees he had drawn up close to his chest. Now the three of them mark the two points of a line. Amaya is relaxed, sitting cross legged in front of a chest of drawers and listening as Lexa and her father talk.

The door slammed open as someone out in the hall pushed it open with a surprising amount of force. Antonius studied the three of them for a moment, and then his eyes fell on the key still sitting in the keyhole of the desk, and his lip curled. “Up,” he ordered. “All three of you. With me.”

Amaya was the first to scramble to her feet, but at her pleading look, Lexa got up too, and once she had, Anders quickly followed.

Antonius carried a whip ready at his belt, and his hand was already on it. Amaya was still young, she had never felt the whip, but she had seen plenty of others attempting to recover in the slave quarters after taking lashes. But she knew her luck may have just run out. She shook her head slightly, trying to somehow negate her punishment, but she knew that begging would only make things worse. She _had_ done what Antonius accused, and if she kept resisting and made Master have to get involved... the very thought made her blanch. Antonius was cruel, but he was limited by Master's orders not to cause any permanent damage to any of the slaves. Lucio Jacaris had no such limitations.

Master was waiting in the courtyard, his steady gaze holding each of the members of their small procession as they were brought before him.

Amaya bowed her head while Antonius unspooled his whip.

Anders watched the proceedings, feeling his anger rise to the surface of his skin as he clenched his fists. He looked over his shoulder at the magister, but the man seemed mostly bored. Anders seethed. He took one step forward, letting go of Lexa's hand, forgetting for the moment that Jacaris still held his daughter as a hostage against his good behavior. Meddling in something that was arguably none of his business might be construed as “causing trouble,” something he'd promised he wouldn't do. But he couldn't let this go.

“Leave her alone,” he barked at the overseer. “She's just a child.”

Antonius looked up at his master, waiting for instructions.

Despite her youth and inexperience, Lexa had finally seemed to realize that something was wrong. “Daddy!” she yelled.

A cruel grin blossomed on Lucio's face. He made a gesture to Antonius: get on with it. Then his eyes turned to Anders. “Perhaps your daughter would be willing to stand in the slave's place.”

“Touch her and I'll _kill_ you,” Anders snarled.

“But Daddy,” Lexa pleaded. She was obviously frightened, but that only made her bravery all the more obvious. “It's _my_ fault. I told Amaya to do it.”

Amaya's head snapped up so that she could look at Lexa. It wasn't true. Amaya had stolen the key for Lexa, yes, but no one had told her to do it. And she would still have to take the punishment. But she hadn't planned on Lexa and her father actually defending her.

“Ten lashes,” Lucio ordered. “For both of them.”

Antonius nodded his understanding. He picked up the whip, then grunted as Anders yanked his forearm back and began wrestling for the weapon.

His eyes widened as he struggled with the mage, and his grip on the whip slipped. It dropped to the ground. Anders fought with the overseer, but the man was bigger than he was, and strong from years of hard labor. But Anders had one thing Antonius did not have: magic. He called on his mana to form crackling bolts of lightning that laced themselves through the fingers of his closed fist. The next punch to Antonius's jaw sent the man sprawling, and the lightning bolts chased him, wrapping themselves around him as he writhed on the ground. Blood seeped from his mouth where he'd bitten his tongue.

Anders picked up the whip and looped it around his hand, needing to keep it out of the other man's grip.

He barely ducked in time before a wave of force magic plowed through the air just where he'd been standing. So this wasn't over after all. He spun around. Jacaris was _seething_. His eyes flashed with fire. Anders traced a glyph in the air and called up a barrier around himself and the two girls. It had just settled into place when the fireball hit it and dissolved. The heat of it spread through the barrier and dissipated.

Anders was all rage and fury, and his mana was wild and barely controlled. He threw spells at Jacaris with nothing but raw strength. Primal spells had never been his strong suit, but now it seemed he wasn't even thinking about them. They just poured from him, ice and lightning and force, as he blindly attacked Lucio Jacaris. His magical attacks came too fiercely and too fast for Jacaris to be able to counter them. The magister fell to his knees, paralyzed by the lightning wrapping itself in smoking lines around his body. He curled up in a fetal position as the lightning shifted to fire. He screamed as it burned through his flesh. After several agonizing moments, the screams stopped, and Jacaris stared accusingly at Anders with wide open, sightless eyes.

Anders's breathing was coming in harsh gasps. He let his barrier spells collapse, and he fell to his knees. The whip was still in his hand. He let go of it and let it sit on the ground next to him.

Lexa ran to him, stopping short just in front of him “Daddy?”

“I'm fine,” he said softly. His heart twinged with the knowledge that there had been plenty of times in Lexa's short life when he _wasn't_ fine. He put his hand on her shoulder and got to his feet.

“Are _you_ alright?” he asked Amaya, who was still frozen where she'd been for the entire fight.

“What did you _do_?” she whined.

What _did_ he do? He'd just killed a magister. What did that even _mean?_

“I...” he started, then stopped. “I was protecting my daughter. And you,” he added, after a heartbeat. Amaya got to her feet, and ran.

“Daddy, where did she go?” she asked, as Anders picked her up and held her at his hip.

“I'm sure she'll be back, baby. Are you scared?”

Lexa shook her head. This was far from the first time she'd seen a man killed by magic. And she trusted her father more than anyone else in the world. Anders kissed the top of her head. The consequences of his actions were stacking up now, spinning all around him. He wanted to go home. He needed to talk to Dorian. But he felt responsible not just for Amaya, but all of the magister's slaves. Even Antonius, who was still unconscious on the ground.

He walked out onto the marble steps leading up to the estate's front door, and sat down with Lexa. No one knew that anything was wrong. Jacaris's absence could certainly be explained away – perhaps he'd taken a trip – no one might bother to check on him for months. He leaned his head back against an entrance pillar, and then glanced at Lexa.

“Lexa, sweetie, I have to stay here. Can you run and get Dorian?”

Lexa grinned, happy to have an important job. “I'll be right back, Daddy,” she promised.

* * * *

Lucio Jacaris was dead. Amaya's heart thundered in her chest. What if someone – what if Antonius – said it was her fault?

Lexa's father had clearly been trying to help, and a part of her _was_ glad that he had stepped in to protect her, though she still couldn't say _why._ But in the real world, things weren't so simple. In the real world, the slaves' world, things had just gotten so much worse.

Just because Master was dead, that didn't mean they were free. They'd be split up and sent to the auction block. Her family would be ripped apart. Amaya sat curled up on her pallet, crying.

Her baby sister and her brother were the first to notice. “'Maya?” Little Wren squealed. “Why're you crying, 'Maya?”

“Shut up,” Xari snapped. He lifted his hand to smack the little girl, but Amaya stopped him.

“Where's Mama?” she asked them both.

Xari looked up. “She's working,” he said.

“I'm gonna go find her.” Xari's eyes widened. They all, even Little Wren, knew better than to interrupt Enna when she was working. But Amaya just shook her head and told Xari to look after Wren. “I'll be back in a minute,” she promised.

She slipped out of the slave quarters and quietly slipped into the house, using the kitchen door. The kitchen was empty except for Lani, as it was after lunch and too soon to be preparing for supper. Amaya tried to get through the kitchen unobserved, but Lani had eyes like a hawk.

“What are you doing here, girl?”

Amaya licked her lips. She knew that Lani would almost certainly see through a lie, so she told the truth. “I'm looking for my mother.”

Lani's eyes narrowed, but she didn't have a good reason to keep Amaya from Enna. She nodded toward the dining room door, which swung inward as Enna entered the kitchen. She saw Amaya, and beckoned her to follow as she grabbed a basket and headed for the door at the back of the kitchen, which led to the courtyard and the gardens beyond.

“No, Mama, don't!” Amaya shouted. But it was too late. Enna let out a shriek, and held her hand to her mouth.

Jacaris's corpse still lay on the ground, battered and charred. It was obvious he had been killed by magic. “That human,” Enna choked out. “He must have...” She whirled around just as Amaya took a cautious step into the room. “How did you know, mi cor tuum?” She held out her arms, and Amaya ran straight into them.

“He was trying to help me,” Amaya said softly. Yes, Anders had turned into something else, all righteous fire and fury. Amaya began to understand how he could be so feared in the south, where they hated mages. Amaya feared magic too, or at least shied away from it, but that was because she knew what the magisters did with it.

“What do you mean?”

Amaya shrugged, but under the scrutiny of her mother's gaze, she began to tell the story. “He was trying to help me,” she repeated, after she'd finished.

“Mi cor tuum,” her mother said softly, hugging her close.

“Come on, Mama,” Amaya pleaded, pulling on her mother's hand. “We have to get out of here before...” She trailed off, but Enna well understood the danger.

“Where are your sisters and brother?”

“Waiting.”

Enna nodded, and hurried through the estate's halls and toward the slave quarters. Once inside, she tucked herself into the corner with her three children.

“Mama,” Amaya whispered. “What if we run?”

Enna slapped her daughter, hard. It wasn't Amaya's fault that she couldn't think things through, she was only ten years old. But Enna knew that trying to go on the run, becoming a fugitive, was dangerous bordering on suicidal, and absolutely impossible when one had three young children to care for. No, they would stay here and wait to see what happened. They would almost certainly be separated on the auction block, but that was just reality for a slave. Enna would survive, and her children were smart. They would survive too, even if she was no longer there to look out for them. She gave each of them a hug in turn, and waited for the news of Jacaris's death to spread to the other slaves.

* * * *

Anders waited for Dorian on the front steps of Lucio Jacaris's estate. He'd barely moved since Lexa had left bearing his message. He kept waiting for someone to come out of the house to question him, or arrest him, but nothing moved except the wind stirring the trees and the occasional bird. After nearly an hour, a familiar man approached, walking up the white stone pathway that led here from the street.

“Dorian,” Anders breathed, as the man stopped in front of him. “I need your help.”

At Anders's nod, Dorian sat down on the step beside him. “What happened? Lexa tried to explain it to me, but...”

“Where is Lexa?” Anders's heart started beating faster even as he asked the question, and he was already beginning to stand up. Dorian grabbed his forearm, urging him to calm.

“I told her to stay at my place. I figured you and I would go back there, in time.”

It took a while for that sentence to make it all the way through to Anders's brain, but when it did, he nodded. “That's good,” he said. “She'll be safe there.”

“And... you're not safe here?” Dorian prompted.

“Did you know this guy? Lucio Jacaris?”

“I've heard of him. I can't say we ever talked. Lexa says he's dead?”

“He was... I...” he shook his head, trying to clear his mind and put his words in order. “Yes,” he said, after taking a deep breath. “He's dead.”

Dorian nods, and then gets down to business. “Well you won't have to worry about the Guard coming in to arrest you or anything. They pretty much let the magisters police themselves.”  
  
“But will they come after me?”

“I highly doubt it. To them, you're little more than a curiosity. The man who started the mage war down south. Magisters tend not to have many friends, so I doubt any of them care enough about Jacaris to seek revenge.”

“Thank you, Dorian.”

“Sure. What else do you need?”

“What happens to his... property?”

“You mean his slaves.” Off Anders's look, Dorian continued. “Lexa did tell me the story. I know she's only eight years old but I believe what she says. You stepped in to protect one of Jacaris's slaves.”

“She's just a little girl. Lexa believes that they are friends.”

Dorian let out a slow breath. He was trying to get the laws changed in Tevinter, giving the slaves some level of basic rights. Politics was a slow process, though, and Anders needed an immediate solution. “Well, normally the city itself would take possession. Usually, they auction off the property, unless Jacaris has some distant relative that wants to come and claim it. You could buy them yourself, but unless you are hiding it very well, you don't have that kind of coin.”

“Do you?”

Dorian shook his head. “For one or two, maybe. Not all of them. And anyway, there's no protocol for setting slaves free in Tevinter, not really. If you let them go, they'd just be hunted down by the slave catchers. Probably put to death for attempting to run.”

“Are you actually listening to yourself?” Anders hissed.

Dorian ran his hands through his hair, and glared at Anders. “I don't _make_ the rules, Anders.”

“I know,” the healer muttered. He had compared the plight of the Circle mages to slavery (correctly, he still believed), but living in a society where slavery was the literal life-blood of economics and politics at every level... this was something different. It wasn't a problem so easily solved by blowing something up.

And anyway, why was he here? He'd told Dorian he just wanted a safe place to raise his daughter. No causes. But he couldn't just do nothing, could he?

“Come on,” Dorian said, putting his hand on Anders's shoulder. “We've done all we can here.”


	4. Chapter 4

Enna held her children tight, the little one in her arms and Xari hiding behind her leg. Amaya hovered behind her shoulder, obviously distressed. Her hands fluttered in front of her like little birds. Enna cleared her throat, and Amaya stilled, though her eyes still darted around, looking for a threat. Along with a dozen other slaves, they were packed into a great cage in the middle of the bustling docks and market of Minrathous.

Amaya felt bile rising up in her throat, and she couldn't tell if that was because of the scent of so many unwashed bodies, or simply her fear.

A key rustled and clanked in the lock on the cage, and the door swung open. None of the slaves inside moved. They rightly feared the punishment that would await them. A beefy pair of arms reached in and grabbed Amaya and her brother.

“No!” Enna cried, reaching out for them. She hadn't truly believed that her family would survive the auction whole, but watching her children torn from her was far different from knowing about the possibility intellectually. She pushed her way toward the open door of the cage. An invisible force, a spell, pushed her backward. She landed on her ass. Wren was wailing next to her. When she looked up, Amaya and Xari were gone. She sucked in a great gulp of air, and cautiously got to her feet.

She held her youngest daughter close, and sobbed into her hair.

* * * *

“I am not sacrificing my daughter for your cause! I won't let her become your pawn!”

Alexa flinched at the sound of her father yelling in the other room.

She could hear Dorian's voice saying something in reply, but she was too far away to hear what, since he wasn't yelling. She snuck a little closer to the door. They were talking about her, after all.

They were arguing in Dorian's office, or study, or library. Whatever he called the room with a desk and all the books in it. The door was slightly open. Lexa stood in the hallway just outside the door, pressed up against the wall as if that would help her hide.

“I know you're out there,” Anders said, after he and Dorian had been silent for several long, tense seconds.

Caught, Lexa stepped into the room.

“I imagine you heard... that,” Dorian said. His arms were crossed over his chest, and his usually relaxed posture had tensed up.

Lexa looked from him to her father, and nodded. “You were fighting about me.”

Anders nodded, just as Dorian started to say “No, we weren't.” He sighed, letting his gaze slide away from Anders and settle on Lexa instead. “Your father is just trying to protect you.” Dorian looked at Lexa's relationship with Anders with barely concealed jealousy. The healer loved his daughter unconditionally, and didn't try to push her into becoming something she wasn't, or make her choices for her. Except, perhaps, now.

Lexa went over to her father and stood there, letting him know she was close. She knew that sometimes he feared that she would be literally taken away from him. He'd told her that fear came from his days in the Circle, where mages weren't allowed to have families, or love, and that anyone he cared about was ripped away from him in one way or another. Even Callin, Lexa's mother, a free mage, was killed in the war. She was ripped away too. From both of them.

Lexa reached out and wrapped her fingers around her father's larger hand. “I want to _help_ ,” Lexa insisted. Anders flinched. She sounded so much like the spirit-ghost Cole, who had come to them in the mage war. It made her seem otherworldly just for a second, not human at all.

“There are lots of ways she can help,” Dorian pointed out softly. “Most of the work we do isn't front line.”

“Who's _we_?”

“The Lucerni.” Anders gave Dorian a flat stare. Dorian sighed. “I'll admit that most of our work was supposed to be done through political means. Through the Senate, the Magisterium. But the kind of change we're trying to force through... it does have to be forced. It has to be pushed for by the people in the streets, the ones who are most affected.”

“What you're doing is dangerous.”

“Since when has that mattered to you?” Dorian asked. But he knew the answer. He looked to Lexa, and then back up at Anders. Things had changed when Anders became a father.

Dorian hadn't known him before then. And the stories he'd heard were conflicted, to say the least. Whether Anders was a hero or a terrorist depended on who was doing the telling. Anders himself refused to accept either label, or maybe he accepted both.

“What do you want me to do, Dorian?” Lexa asked. She was serious in a way he still wasn't used to. She'd done a lot of growing up in the past few weeks.

Dorian looked sideways at Anders, waiting for him to flat refuse if he was going to. But the healer said nothing.

“I want you to liase with the children.”

“Liase?”

“Talk to. Like you did with Amaya when you were in the estate with her. Just... establish yourself as an ally. Someone who will help.”

Alexa looked at him, that's it, just _looked_ , in a way that made it obvious that he was talking over her head. No matter how smart she was, she was still only eight years old. “Make friends. Play. And listen.”

After a minute, she nodded. “Okay. I can do that.”

* * * *

The growing unrest in the city made Anders uncomfortable, and when he was uncomfortable he got keyed up, on edge. He rarely slept. He made plans to run, to take Lexa and... but where would they go? He had already burned all his bridges down south. At least here in Minrathous, no one wanted him dead. But his stomach flip-flopped and his head ached with tension.

“Cally,” he whispered to no one. “I wish you were here.”

He leaned his head against the doorframe, and exhaled slowly. Lexa was off on one of her adventures, and she had no way of knowing how much this city on fire reminded him of Kirkwall. It had not come to violence yet. But the way that people were screaming in the streets, it was only a matter of time.

“You're wrong,” a solemn voice said.

Anders spun around, mana already called to his hand. Lightning crackled in his hand, dancing there as he took in Lexa's friend Amaya. He hadn't realized she even knew where to find him. He'd never expected to see her again. He studied her carefully, looking for any sign of something wrong. But she seemed unhurt, if worried. “What do you mean, I'm wrong?”

“What you just said,” Amaya clarified. Anders hadn't even realized he'd been speaking aloud. “You said it hadn't come to violence. But it has.”

“What are you talking about?” Anders asked. It wasn't like he knew everything that happened in the city, but if something like a _war_ were sparked, he'd know it, wouldn't he?”

“You have to pay attention. Just open your eyes and ears. Come on.” Amaya was already turning toward the door of the clinic, walking like she expected to be followed. Anders sighed, and followed her.

The crowds in the streets seemed to have grown more numerous in their growing hostility. At least Anders felt like there were bodies pressed against him no matter which way he turned. He had trouble keeping an eye on Amaya as she threaded through the throngs of people. But she was headed for the docks, and the docks at least had a known ending point, at the crashing of dark water.

Amaya stopped near the berth of a ship loading itself for war, and Anders watched as boys too young to shave were herded onto it.

“They're conscripts,” Amaya said, when he caught up to her. There was an edge to her voice, not like the one she had when she spoke of the magisters, but the soporati still owned slaves. Not these, though. These were the poor, just scraping by, with no say in the matter when the military came to their door, and ripped children away from their homes.

“They're cannon fodder,” Anders murmured. He'd sat out the war in Ferelden, during the Blight, and the mage-templar war was something altogether different. But he still understood what was going to happen to those young men – those _children_ – they'd be thrown into the most difficult, dangerous, impossible fighting. They'd die, unmourned and unremembered.

“There's a group. Lucerni backed, though they'd never say so. They're gathering a resistance. They'll fight back against the army the next time a ship like this comes into harbor.”

Anders nodded his understanding. He couldn't be angry at the oppressed who fought for their freedom – he supported them, in fact – but that didn't change the fact that their actions brought the city one step closer to the conflagration he feared.

“They aren't the only ones dying,” Amaya said, though she sounded a bit more sympathetic this time. Toward him, anyway. Definitely not towards the ones who were doing the killing.

“What-?” Anders started, but he bit his tongue.

He knew before they got there where she was taking him, and he shook his head. “I don't need to see-”

“They're _people_ ,” Amaya pointed out. She flung her hand out toward the five slaves – four humans and an elf – who were slowly and horribly dying, crucified on the Plaza of Punishment.

Anders shot Amaya a sidelong glance. “What do you think we should do? Rescue them?”

“They're beyond saving,” was the response, and true or not, it was chilling coming from an eleven-year-old. “They're up there because they were inciting rebellion. Or at least that's what the altus say.”

Anders nodded his understanding. It wasn't only the soporati that were growing openly defiant. He wouldn't have been surprised to find that the Lucerni were secretly manipulating the slave rebellions. Anders had blown up a church and sparked a war that killed thousands to get mages the freedom they deserved. How could he do anything less than support the slaves of Tevinter in their bid for that same freedom? But, he thought, looking at the plaza – _forcing_ himself to look – if this was the consequence... “I won't send others to their deaths for the sake of my own cause. Not again.”

“It _not_ your cause,” Amaya said. “It's our cause.”

Anders's eyes widened. It was like, for the first time, he was actually _hearing_ her talk. “You're one of them,” he said. “A rebel.” Amaya did not confirm nor deny that fact, but she hardly needed to. “But you're so young,” he added softly. Coincidentally, the same age he'd been when the templars had found him, and dragged him to Kinloch Hold.

Amaya smiled, and shrugged. She held her hand up to her cheek, lightly. “I used to get in trouble,” she said. “I asked... dangerous questions, when I was a kid.”

“You're _still_ a kid,” Anders admonished, but his heart wasn't in it. The truth was, he knew all about those dangerous questions.

* * * *

“The magisters think magic's the only thing they need, but that's never been true. They need their slaves to take care of everything for them. Without a source of free labor, they'd fall apart.”

“I'm not talking about abolishing slavery,” Dorian moaned.

“Well, maybe you should start talking about it,” Anders replied. It sounded flippant, but Dorian knew the man was totally serious.

“We can't all be like you,” Dorian shot back immediately.

In truth, he had always been somewhat jealous of Anders, since he'd first heard the stories of the man who almost single-handedly liberated the southern Circles. He wondered what it would be like to be so decisive, cut free of red tape. He'd been shown a little bit of that in the Inquisition, but the Inquisition's binding together of so many disparate groups had required strings and tape of every color. And in the end, it had all fallen apart anyway.

Sometimes, having a cause just wasn't enough.

“We end slavery, all of Tevinter collapses. I _cannot_ support that.”

“So you really are just one of them.”

Anders had never been one of the upper crust, in any society. Decades before he'd ever willingly made his home in the sewers and slums of Minrathous and Kirkwall, he'd spent his childhood as a migrant laborer, working sunrise to sunset or later in the fields in exchange for just enough food to keep from starving. He _understood_ the people desperately fighting for change in Tevinter. Once, he'd thought justice for mages was the only thing that mattered, but in the aftermath of the mage-templar war, he was learning that plenty of other people in the world deserved justice too, from the elves of Orlais to the slaves of Tevinter.

“Dammit, Fenris,” he cursed under his breath. He wondered what the white-haired elf would say if he were here. Probably, he would never willingly work with Dorian, and the Lucerni alliance would have broken before it even started.

* * * *

Dorian and Maevaris and the rest of the Lucerni had been trying for years to get to a more fair Tevinter. But he was forced to realize that, from the top, they could never truly understand what that goal looked like. They needed to be on the ground, or at least in close contact with the people who were. He'd never really spent much time with Sera at Skyhold, but he understood her position now, in ways he'd never considered before.

Lexa, exactly as he'd asked her to be, was a liason between him and the ideals of politics and the reality of the situation on the ground, the children who were suffering or succeeding based on what the Lucerni set into motion.

But he was often too busy to talk to Lexa. She'd noticed his gruffness, his stress, the way he was juggling too much, but she had no idea how to handle it. She just told the truth. He didn't ask her to, he was barely even looking at her, after all. His attention was fully focused on whatever paperwork was on his desk.

“Dorian?” she asked tentatively. “Are you scared?”

He turned around in his chair and beckoned her closer. “Scared of what?”

“That there might be another war.”

He knew that she meant a war like the mage-templar war of her early childhood. There wouldn't be a war like that one, not in Tevinter where the templars held no real power. But the class war that he and his Lucerni allies were feeding... Lexa wasn't wrong to believe it may erupt. It was on the edge of doing so already, each day was a tentative balance. Each day there were winners. And losers.

Dorian had started to make it a habit to walk through the dockside neighborhoods and the Plaza of Punishment, disguised of course. But he needed to see the death and devastation. He needed to understand exactly what he was doing.

It wasn't that it wasn't worth it, and anyway, it was too late to stop the cascade now. The dominoes he had tipped were now falling without his influence. But maybe that was just him wanting to push away the blame. Watching innocent slaves die in agony, watching innocent people caught up in the street violence sparked by the desperate soporati... despite being a necromancer, Dorian had never gotten used to watching people die.

“I suppose I am scared, a little,” he told Anders's daughter. He hadn't seen a war end well in his lifetime. To be completely honest, he wasn't exactly sure he had ever seen a war end. The Tevinters conflict with the Qunari was ongoing, and had been going for a century or more, beyond the memory of anyone yet living. The mage-templar war hadn't ended so much as been buried when the mage rebellion was subsumed by the Inquisition. And then the Inquisition broke. The Chantry was still in shambles and there were no Circles in the southlands anymore. But if the theories circling about this “Fade sickness” (or whatever they were calling it) were true, than that might not matter. Soon enough there might not be any mages for the Circles to house and teach. And _that_ thought did terrify him.

But Lexa wasn't a mage. Her fears had nothing to do with the Fade. They had to do with the riots and rebellions that were flooding Minrathous, growing with each passing day.

The Magisterium was in an uproar, of course. The magisters were losing control of their slaves, and the authorities in the city that might help them were pre-occupied by trying to maintain order. They were forced to contract with mercenary slave hunters to track down the ones who had run, and the overseers they usually relied on to maintain order grew more cruel and vindictive as the slaves pushed against the boundaries that had once seemed unbreakable.

Dorian had spoken a bit with Varric and Anders both about Kirkwall. Both had agreed that the mage-templar war had begun there, even before Anders blew up the Chantry, because of Knight Commander Meredith's oppressive rule. The mages resisted the harsh restrictions and punishments the templars enforced, yet the more they resisted, the harder Meredith squeezed.

The same thing was happening in Minrathous now.

Yet what was Dorian supposed to do? Expect the magisters to simply give up their slaves, out of the goodness of their hearts? Expect the caste system that had thrived in Tevinter since the days of Arlathan to simply disappear overnight? Just because he wanted it to? Yeah, right, Dorian. That'll never happen.

He sent Lexa home, and sat with his depressing thoughts until Maevaris Tilani appeared on his doorstep, bringing the remains of a late lunch.

“What are you doing here?” he asked stupidly, as she stood on his doorstep with an eyebrow raised.

“You don't think we need to talk? With all that's going on?”

Dorian sighed, and pulled the door open wider. “Come in.”

* * * *

Anders could have met with Feynriel in his dreams, yet that felt... well, he wanted something concrete. A face to face meeting. And so he crossed the city toward the estate where Feynriel stayed with his teacher, the magister. Anders was immediately out of place in the sprawling home, and unnervingly reminded of his weeks held captive at Lucio Jacaris's similar manor.

Feynriel took him out into a courtyard and sat down at a table and chairs made of wrought iron. Anders took a seat, and met the half-elf's eyes.

“How much have you gotten into the city recently?” Anders asked carefully.

Feynriel shrugged. _Not much_ , his eyes seemed to say. Feynriel had rarely ever gotten out into the city of Minrathous in the years since he'd come here. Magister Clintus preferred to keep him indoors, studying and researching.

“Lucky you,” Anders quipped. “It's a damned mess out there.”

“But that isn't why you're here,” Feynriel prompted.

Anders shook his head. “No.”

“You're here because you still think there's some way to go back in time through the Fade.”

“Isn't there?”

“My master isn't Venatori, but through some sort of dealing, he was able to track down some of their research.”

“Dorian knew Magister Alexius. The one who cast the time spells in Ferelden. Maybe he knows more than whatever papers you've found.”

Feynriel nodded slowly, but his eyes lacked the eager spark that had Anders leaning forward and tapping his fingers on the table with obvious impatience.

“From what I've read – and Magister Pavus might know differently, it's true – but, I don't think it's possible to travel backward any further than the time the Breach was created. And now that the Breach is closed, it may not be possible at all.”

“But that's only if you're trying to travel in the real world, right? We're only trying to travel in the Fade. And time works differently there.”

“Well, yes. But I can only see the dreams of those currently living. To go back a thousand years...”

“We have to _try_ ,” Anders pleaded. “We have allies. People who will help.”

Feynriel nodded. He understood Anders's desperation. He was a mage too, after all. He'd once told Hawke that his biggest fear was being made Tranquil – it was a fear all mages shared. If he and Anders didn't try, if magic was ripped away from the world for good... he shook his head, fighting off the very thought. It would be like all mages being made Tranquil, across the entire world.

* * * *

Dorian had the theory that researching something – knowing the facts and the history about it – would make it easier to find the place in the Fade. The problem was that Arlathan had been utterly destroyed, ripped away completely from the elves. There _was_ no history, not even oral history, never mind the idea of finding anything written down. The elves had no knowledge of their old culture. It had been crushed under centuries of servitude and oppression.

Feynriel agreed with Dorian. You needed a link, an anchor, something to hold onto, or an attempt to go back in time would just lead to wandering the Fade forever. So they need a link to someone or something from a thousand years ago.

But first, they just needed to figure out how it all _worked._

Anders decided to test the theory by going back to someplace familiar. Maker help him, the first place he thought of was Kinloch Hold. The site of the Circle Tower was old by Ferelden standards, but that made it only half as old as Arlathan. Still, it was a place to start.

Anders swallowed three vials of lyrium, needing to travel in the Fade, needing power that he could not create alone. It was not the first time he'd compared this activity to the Harrowing – it was, essentially, the same thing – but at least this time he could avoid the demons instead of being forced to fight them.

He closed his eyes, although what he was doing was almost the exact opposite of sleeping. Navigating the Fade in this way required him to be more awake than he ever could be in the mundane world, and hypervigilant. He could feel the wind swirling around him, and he tried to center himself by breathing, in and out.

He cemented himself in the Fade, opening his eyes to find the familiar gold-green at the edges of his vision, and familiar bars in front of him. This was the cell in the basements of Kinloch Hold where he'd spent nearly a full year in solitary confinement. He ran his hand over the rock walls, carved and scratched by his desperate hand. And then he sank to the thin straw pallet on the floor. He leaned his head back against the wall and reminded himself that he _wasn't_ trapped here. He could leave any time he wanted.

 _This is my anchor_ , he thought. _Now take me back in time._

The dungeon cells had been a part of Kinloch Hold long before it ever became a home for mages. Anders used the rocks walls and the bars to hold himself in place while he searched the Fade for strong emotions, the kind of magic that rooted a mage to a particular time and place, that made them linger in the Fade. It wasn't quite the same thing as a ghost, more like an echo. An echo from a sound created very far away.

“Who are you?” Anders whispered, as he walked toward the source of the sound. “Where are you?”

The answer that awaited him wasn't unexpected, but it was unwelcome.

A man, muscular but obviously undernourished, dangled from the ceiling of the cell by his wrists. Another man, dressed in unfamiliar armor, held a sharp knife in his hands. It glinted in the torchlight coming from the hall outside the cell.

Anders took a step back, through the bars – because nothing was solid in the Fade – and he watched while holding his breath and wiping the tears out of his eyes with the back of his arm as a ghost of four hundred years ago tortured a captive. He stood outside the cell, near hyperventilating, as the man broke under the flaying knife. The armored man didn't even ask him any questions. This was punishment, not interrogation.

Anders closed his eyes and pushed back farther, his hand wrapped around the bar, squeezing so tightly it hurt. When he opened them again, he wasn't in the past, but in the present, in the real world, in his bed at the clinic with the world spinning around him. He sat up and pushed down hard on the bed, trying to center himself.

“Did it work?” Feynriel asked.

Anders nodded. He reached for a waterskin and sucked it nearly dry. His eyes were sunken and scared as he looked at the half-elf. “You do this shit all the time?” he asked, disbelieving.

“I walk from person to person, dream to dream. It is not quite the same.”

“But similar enough.”

“Yes.”

“I felt like I was really there.”

“You _were_ ,” Feynriel assured him. “The Fade is just as real as anything on this side of the Veil. More real, some say.”

Anders made a noise of agreement. Just like the Harrowing, this trip into the Fade had felt hyperreal. More than just watching, he felt like he'd experienced the torture of the unlucky soldier in the dungeons of the fortress.

“It does work,” he said. “That gives us a bit of hope, doesn't it?”

Feynriel gave Anders a weak smile, but there was worry in his eyes. Anders knew what he was thinking – to find an anchor to travel back a thousand years or more, to the days of Arlathan, they would need to _find_ something surviving from that time, first. And both Tevinter and the southern Chantry had done a pretty thorough job of erasing the history of the elves.

“There must be something in a library somewhere, surely,” Anders insisted.

“I can look,” Feynriel said. “I will go to the Circle tomorrow and see what I can find. And the day after tomorrow. This might take weeks. Or months.”

“Do it,” Anders said firmly. “And I'll try to stop the city from collapsing into chaos, in the mean time.”

Feynriel actually smiled at that. “Since when have you been afraid of a little bit of chaos?”

* * * *

Neither Anders nor Feynriel had ever tried to stay attached to another person in the Fade. Their travels to the other side of the Veil had been intensely personal. And since the Fade was built on a person's emotions and memories, it was easy to get separated within that infinite realm. Two people could be in the same physical place but in different times, or with the ghosts and echoes of different people. Two people could be in the same physical place and see two very different things.

“We need something to hold us together,” Anders said.

“What, like a rope?”

Feynriel's smile was contagious. Anders couldn't help but smile back. “Yeah, like a rope. Or... something.”

“The Fade is built of strong emotions. Any “rope” we create will have to be made of similar stuff.”

Anders felt his heart flutter. His stomach tightened a bit.

It had been a long, long time since he'd allowed himself to be emotionally bonded to anyone, unless you counted Lexa. And her mother's absence was still a gaping wound when he allowed it to be one.

“You felt... strongly, for Cal- Hawke.”

Feynriel nodded. She'd been his anchor in the Fade back when he'd thought he was permanently lost in the dream realm. She had saved him. But Anders had been there too.

“How did you find her, in the Fade?”

“I was pulled toward her dreams. And she was looking for me.”

“And you know how to find me, don't you? You're... pulled toward my dreams?” Feynriel's cheeks flushed noticeably, and he nodded. “So we can find each other,” Anders determined.

“Yes. I suppose so.” After a minute, Feynriel looked up, still obviously deep in thought. “Did you ever wonder why you don't seem to be affected by this... Fade sickness?” he asked.

Anders shrugged. “Neither of us are, from what I can tell.”

“True. My master is most jealous.”

“I know you have a stronger connection to the Fade than any other living person. For some reason, that must make you immune.”

“You would think that would make this magical illness _more_ likely to affect me, wouldn't it?”

But Anders was already shaking his head. “You keep open the connection that is closing everywhere else.”

“And so do you?”

“I'm a spirit healer, Feynriel. I'm used to pulling from the Veil. You and I, we're like... conduits. Magic flows through us at a deeper level than most mages.”

“I've never really thought of it that way.”

“You've never had to.”

* * * *

Two young children chased each other through the halls, laughing. Magelight illuminated the darkened corners of the stone hallways, filling them with a comfortable warmth. Anders took a slow and careful breath, following in Feynriel's footsteps. The half-elf walked through the halls with surprising confidence, and the other mages here viewed him with a measure of respect. Anders they saw as more of a curiosity. He could hear the whispers following him. He didn't let his guard down, not even when Feynriel led him into the library, which was literally jaw-dropping. The bookshelves were built of rich mahogany, intricately carved, and the covers of the books themselves were, often as not, filigreed with gold. The entire place screamed of wealth and self-importance, and the mages sitting within it were dressed in finely tailored robes that echo the sentiment. Anders swallowed hard and looked down at his simple tunic and breeches. He hadn't willingly worn a robe since leaving Ferelden's Circle for the last time, and he wasn't going to change that habit just to fit in here. But he did feel radically underdressed.

Feynriel reached out to grab his hand, offering just enough reassurance. Anders laced his fingers within the younger man's, and the two of them found a small table in a hidden corner of the library. The look of concern on Feynriel's face showed that Anders was doing a poor job of hiding his discomfort. But although he knew, intellectually, that the Tevinter Circles were the complete antithesis of the Circle he grew up trapped within, it didn't make him feel any better. He looked around for templars, and there were a few, stationed around the room. But the mages here conversed without the fear of being overheard, and beyond that, they freely experimented with their power.

“What are we looking for?” Anders whispered.

Feynriel shrugged, continuing forward. “I guess we'll know it when we see it."

Anders walked over to one of the library's shelves, careful not to leave Feynriel's field of vision. A minute later, he came back, a scroll clutched in his hand.

He unrolled it on the table, revealing an ancient map of the Tevinter Imperium that pre-dated the existence of the Chantry.

Feynriel leaned over and looked at it with obvious curiosity.

“I used to love maps,” Anders murmured. “In the Circle, I'd pore over them for hours.”

“Looking for a way out?”

“Yes. But more than that.”

Feynriel nodded as if he understood, but his childhood hadn't included any kind of formal education – his mother had passed down what she knew of the Dalish oral tradition, but he could only barely read the Tevene that his master had taught him, using children's readers and setting one of his scribes, an educated slave, as his teacher. That's why he was letting Anders do much of the research, though he was trying not to be obvious about just how overwhelmed he was by the written word.

Time seemed to pass incredibly slowly as Feynriel waited for Anders to say something. A part of him tried to relax enough to settle into the Fade, but there was too much going on around him. Not just Anders, but the apprentices of the Minrathous Circle casting spells and dabbling on the edges of the Veil. Feynriel didn't want to have to fight his way through a crowd just to be able to do something useful in the dream realm.

“I think I found something,” Anders said quietly, what felt like at least an hour later. He scooted over to give Feynriel room to look over his shoulder. “Look,” he said, pointing at the map.

“That's in Orlais,” Feynriel said. “The Emerald Graves.”

It made sense that wreckage from the time of Arlathan might have survived there, but Anders stomach constricted and his body grew tense with worry.

“I can't go to Orlais,” he pleaded.

One look at Feynriel was all it took to be sure that the young man understood. He was still Orlais's most wanted criminal, and he had Lexa to think about.

“I can go without you...” Feynriel started, but already Anders was shaking his head.

“No. We need both of us to make this ritual work, that's the entire point.” He took in a shaky breath. “I have to go,” he insisted, and he wasn't sure if he was trying to convince Feynriel or himself.

Feynriel nodded too. He wanted to make a promise that he could keep Anders safe, but he remembered his years hiding from Kirkwall's templars, and he wasn't sure of his ability to keep anybody safe at all. He'd sat out the entirety of the mage-templar war, after all. Even Anders's eight-year-old daughter hadn't been that cowardly. Anders seemed to understand. Feynriel waited for the look of disappointment to cross his face, but he saw nothing but Anders's original worry. The healer shook his head, trying to clear it, and then he pulled a small scrap of parchment from a pocket and began sketching the part of the map they needed to find the old ruins they were going to have to look for when they got to Orlais.

Luckily, the Emerald Graves were hardly populated. There were rumors that the Inquisitor had gone there during the time of his Inquisition. Dorian might know more about that. Anders would ask him the next time he saw him. And he'd ask him for something else as well.


	5. Chapter 5

“You might as well come in here and stop lurking about,” Anders's voice called. Amaya jumped, startled and guilty, but she did as she was bid.

It may have been Anders who had noticed her, but his daughter was the one who ran out to meet her. She wrapped her arms around Amaya's skinny waist, then pushed her backward so she could see her. “I was worried about you,” she said solemnly. It was an understatement. She'd stayed up in the middle of the night agonizing over what might have happened to the friend she'd met in Jacaris's estate. She'd looked for her in the slave markets, without ever quite admitting that that's what she was doing. Her father seemed to understand.

Amaya smiled, feeling freer – almost truly free – now than she could possibly have felt when she'd first met Lexa.

“What are you doing here?” the younger girl asked.

“I... wanted to see you.” Was it truly that simple? Was it that she'd wanted a destination – a goal – for her first “mission” of sorts. Was it that she wanted Lexa involved in her search for her mother? The younger girl knew the importance of family. She and Anders were practically inseparable. But in all the days Amaya had spent with her, she had never mentioned a mother.

“I missed you, too,” Lexa said. It wasn't that she didn't have any other friends – Lexa was the kind of child who made friends easily, among both children and adults. But she shared a fire-forged bond with Amaya, and she wouldn't let herself forget her.

Amaya cleared her throat awkwardly, looking around the small clinic. Now that she was here, she wasn't quite sure what to do. It wasn't like she had orders to watch Anders and Lexa, not like back at Jacaris's estate. Now she could actually _be_ a friend. What did that look like?

A tabby cat purred from under one of the clinic's patient cots. There didn't seem to be anyone in the clinic right now, and Amaya supposed that was a good thing. The winter had brought sickness to a lot of people.

“Sit down,” Anders said, and he nodded toward another one of the cots. Amaya sat. “It's good to see you well.” Amaya grinned, at nodded. She _felt_ well. She was fed well, and treated well, and she almost understood what her mother had meant when she said that a Master could still feel sort of like family. She still missed _her_ family, it was like an aching wound. But she would solve that problem too.

“I need your help,” she said to Anders, and he nodded.

“Anything,” he promised. Beside him, Lexa smiled.

* * * *

“Finding an individual slave in a city as large as this one is not a simple task, Anders.”

“But you can do it, can't you?”

He was fully aware that he was asking a lot of Dorian, one favor on top of another, and they weren't small favors. Dorian was clearly aware of it too, from the way he narrowed his eyes at Anders.

“I'll make some inquiries,” he finally said, and Anders released the breath he had been holding.

“Thank you, Dorian,” Anders sighed.

Dorian's gaze turned worried. “What's wrong?” he asked.

“What makes you think something's wrong?” Anders replied, but the truth was, his brain was already running rapid-fire, a thousand miles a minute, spinning out possible futures and syncing up with the beat of his heart. And in his heart, he _knew_ that leaving Jacaris's slaves to fend for themselves had been the wrong decision.

Isabela had told him in Kirkwall about her snap decision to free a cargo hold full of men, women, and children rather than let them fall into slavery. If she could do it, how could he stand by and do nothing while the trade took place all around him? In Kirkwall, Anders had smuggled mages out of the Gallows despite the certain consequences if they were caught. How can he do any less now to help the slaves of Tevinter, who certainly deserve the same freedoms?

Dorian shifted in his chair, a pained look on his face, as Anders asked these questions aloud. It wasn't the first time they'd had this argument, and it surely wouldn't be the last. “I’ve introduced several proposals for debate in the Senate.”

Anders shook his head. ( _There can't be a compromise_ , whispered an old, dangerous voice that he'd thought was long dead). “Your proposals are being shot down, he said, in what he hoped was a calm-sounding voice. “These people are risking their _lives_ , Dorian. We have to give them something. Some sign that we’ll stand up for them when it matters.”

Dorian nodded, knowing that Anders was right. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll do what I can.”

He didn't elaborate, and Anders grit his teeth, but didn't ask him to. He knew how this worked, knew that Dorian, in his own way, was trying to keep Anders shielded from the most dangerous work of the Lucerni, for the sake of his daughter. 

But Lexa's in the thick of it, too. And if Magister Jacaris had been able to find out who Anders was and use his daughter against him, who’s to say that others won’t, as well?

Anders would do anything to keep Lexa safe, and that meant leaving her with Dorian while he and Feynriel traveled to Orlais. His heart still thrummed with fear when he thought about going back there, but if that was what it took to solve the accelerating decline of magic in the world, how could he not do it? His actions in the past had shaped the world, for better and worse. His work wasn't done yet.

“Be good,” he said, hugging Lexa close to him on the morning he was going to leave with Feynriel. The sun had risen less than an hour ago, and was still blindingly bright in the eastern sky. He squinted into the light as Lexa squirmed within his grasp. He dropped down to one knee, looking her in the eye.

“Why can't I come with you?” she whined. Ever since she'd lost her mother, Lexa had been hesitant to be away from Anders for any length of time. It was a hesitation he shared. He smoothed her hair and tucked a stray strand behind her ear.

“I'll be back before you know it,” he promised. Lexa just glared at him. Anders sighed, but he didn't revoke or revise his promise. He kissed Lexa's forehead, then ducked his head, putting them eye to eye. Lexa's eyes were the same color as Callin's. It sent a twinge through his heart every time he saw them. “I love you,” he said, voice steady even though a large part of him wanted to tell Feynriel to go without him because he couldn't leave his little girl behind.

Lexa flashed him a shy smile. “I love you too, Daddy.”

He gave her one last hug, then headed down the path leading away from Dorian's large house, toward the Minrathous Circle where he'd agreed to meet Feynriel. He didn't look back, not trusting himself to be able to keep going if he did.

Dorian looked down at Lexa. “Are you hungry?” he asked.

* * * *

“Are you alright?” Feynriel asked softly.  
  
Anders ran his hand through his short black hair, and slowly nodded. The disguise was a necessary part of getting him into Orlais. But Feynriel wasn't asking him about his hair. The painful sensation of magebane spiked throughout his entire body, from his gut outwards to his limbs and head and hands and feet. His head felt too heavy, like he was swimming underwater and couldn't get enough air to breathe. It was a familiar sensation, but not a welcome one.

Without magic, he felt defenseless. And worse than that, he felt violated, as if the very core of his identity had been violently ripped away.

But this had been his idea in the first place.

“I'll be fine,” he told Feynriel, who worried too much. He tilted his head a bit to allow the half-elf access to his cheek. Feynriel carefully drew the razor over Anders's skin, shaving away the stubble that wasn't thick enough to be called a beard.

“You don't have to...” Feynriel started, but Anders cut him off with a wave of his hand. This was an argument they'd had before, and he understood Feynriel's desire to protect him, but the agony of magebane was worth it if it meant going back to his daughter. He didn't even want to imagine what awaited him at the hands of even a broken Chantry. (He had imagined it, many dark nights, back when Callin was alive, and when she wasn't).

The Emerald Graves weren't exactly well-populated, but Anders had become the type of man who would rather be safe than sorry. When had that happened? How had it happened? Sometime during the war, he figured. Maybe the day that he'd become a father.

Feynriel finished shaving him and Anders got up to walk to the edge of their camp. They were still in Tevinter, in a wide open wilderness claimed by no one. It was a place for runaways, fugitive slaves and deserters from the military. Hunters patrolled the area regularly, but they weren't looking for Anders or Feynriel, who were, after all, only returning home.

“We might cross the border tomorrow,” he mused. He'd left Feynriel behind round the fire pit, but he wasn't surprised to find the younger man standing just behind him, staring into the dim daylight of the forest. “Have you ever been to Orlais?”

“Only passing through,” Feynriel replied.

Anders nodded. During the mage war, the worst of the fighting had been in Orlais, where the Circles were nearly as restrictive as Kirkwall's had been. Lexa had been born there, in fact, making his daughter technically an Orlesian. He grinned at the thought, and Feynriel smiled too, when he shared it aloud. Anders wondered if Lexa thought of herself as Orlesian, or Tevinter, or maybe she knew that she belonged nowhere, like he himself did. Anders's family had always been wanderers, migrant laborers, and Lexa was a wanderer too. Callin was Fereldan if she was anything, but then she was a symbol of Kirkwall, and that city had retained a hold on her until the day she died.

Feynriel, who belonged neither to the city elves nor the Dalish, and who knew nothing of his human father, also understood what it was to be a refugee, drifting, taken in by the kindness of others and given a place to lay his head, but not a place to belong.

He reached out to take Anders's hand, and he melted into the warmth of the other man's skin. Anders brushed a kiss against the back of Feynriel's neck. “I'm fine,” he repeated to the younger man. Feynriel nodded. He pressed himself closer to Anders's body, and Anders found himself weaving his fingers through the younger man's unbraided hair. He took a careful breath, and the look on his face betrayed a certain hesitation.

“I'm a healer, Feynriel,” Anders reminded him. “You've nothing to fear from me.”

The half-elf nodded. As Anders watched, he slowly peeled off his shirt. Anders rested one hand on his hip and traced a finger up his spine with the other hand. Feynriel shivered at the touch.

“You like that?” Anders murmured into the young man's ear. Feynriel nodded. His skin was slightly flushed, and he moaned as Anders pressed his lips to the curve of his neck.

“Maker, Anders...”

“Lay down.” Anders gently pushed Feynriel onto his own bed. The half-elf lay on his stomach, arms up above his head. He sighed happily as Anders lay down next to him. He massaged Feynriel's stiff muscles with practiced hands.

Feynriel could feel himself getting hard, his cock straining at his breeches, stirring as Anders kept _touching_ him.

“Anders, please,” Feynriel begged, wriggling his hips until Anders placed a gentle hand on his buttock and pushed him down.

“Patience,” Anders whispered back. He grabbed the back of Feynriel's neck and pulled him down into a bruising kiss. Feynriel squirmed under the presssure of that hold, and Anders let him up. Their eyes met again.

“Please Feynriel,” Anders said softly. The half-elf nodded. Anders kissed him again, more gently this time, and then his hands slid down Feynriel's skinny ribs until he came to the waistband of his pants. Feynriel scrambled to untie the laces of his breeches, and Anders pushed them down, barely waiting for them to be fully undone. He got down on his knees, and took Feynriel's member into his mouth.

“Maker,” Feynriel panted, as Anders's tongue worked its way up and down his shaft. When his teeth gently scraped along the same path, Feynriel almost lost control completely. His hands clenched into tight fists, until Anders gently took his wrists in his hands, as he sucked.

Feynriel shuddered, his hips thrusting forward, pushing himself deeper into Anders's mouth. “Anders, I'm gonna...”

Anders tried to nod, giving Feynriel permission, but the boy wasn't used to holding back anyway. When he came, Anders swallowed the juices, then slipped away from Feynriel and settled back on his heels.

Feynriel sat down, half collapsing.

“This isn't your first time, is it?” Anders asked. It seemed like the kind of thing he should have known. But it didn't exactly come up in casual conversation, and it was important to know.

Feynriel shook his head, but Anders caught a flash of something on his face or in his eyes that was familiar enough to be worrying. He didn't want to pry, but he also didn't want-

“Anders, it's okay,” Feynriel interrupted his train of thought. The boy looked serious, but also hopeful. He _wanted_ Anders, for whatever that was worth.

“I just don't want-”

“It's different with you. Anders, please, just trust me on this.”

After a minute, Anders slowly nodded. “I'll go slow,” he said soothingly, and Feynriel nodded too. He trusted Anders. And he wasn't nearly as submissive as anybody might first think. Anders smiled to see it.

He settled in behind Feynriel and reached around with one hand to circle his nipple with his thumb. Feynriel let out a little whimper, and Anders kissed the back of his neck. With his other hand, he reached over to into his bag and fumbled around until his fingers wrapped around a small jar. He pulled it out and set it next to him. He withdrew his hand from Feynriel's chest, making the boy whimper again.

“Just a minute,” Anders told him. With one hand, he pushed down on the small of Feynriel's back, holding him steady. His other hand dipped into the jar, coating his fingers with oil inside. He spread Feynriel's legs and slipped one finger in between the cheeks of his ass. He circled Feynriel's opening, causing the boy to moan and push his hips back and forth. Anders grinned, and gently pushed his finger in. He moved in and out, feeling Feynriel slowly relax as he grew used to the intrusion. When he was sure the boy was ready, Anders slipped in another finger. He could tell he'd hit the sweet spot when Feynriel's breathing turned into heavy panting, and a string of babbled pleas escaped the young man's lips. Anders scissored his fingers apart, opening Feynriel wider. He slipped a third finger inside, stretching the boy until he was sure Feynriel was ready to take his cock. He pressed himself against Feynriel's entrance and pulled his fingers out. He used his hands to hold the boy open, and he pushed himself inside.

He thrust slowly, taking a minute to find his rhythm. “Are you alright?” he murmured into Feynriel's ear.

“Maker, yes!”

Anders grinned. He pulled back and then pushed in deeper, listening to Feynriel's desperate moans.

“Harder, Anders, please,” Feynriel begged, but Anders continued to go slow and easy, pushing in deeper with every thrust, until he had pushed himself all the way in. He could feel Feynriel's ass moving, trying to invite more stimulation to his most intimate spot. Anders pushed him down a little, raising his ass and changing the angle of his thrusts.

“Better?” he asked, and Feynriel choked out a yes.

Anders picked up the pace a little, until he and Feynriel both were breathing a little heavier. He listened to Feynriel's stuttering moans as he began to feel the oncoming throes of climax. Anders finished with a desperate exhalation, spilling his seed inside Feyriel. He pulled out and sat back on his knees, after replacing his pants.

Feynriel rolled over onto his back, unembarrassed by his nakedness. Anders grinned at him. The half-elf looked pleasantly exhausted. Anders shifted to lay down on his stomach, and he draped his arm over Feynriel's body.

“We can't stay like this forever.” Feynriel pointed out sleepily.

“Why not?”

Feynriel picked himself up onto his elbows and shook his head, but gave no verbal response. Anders leaned down to kiss him, slow and deep. Feynriel relaxed under the touch, especially when Anders reached out to press his hand at the small of his back, steadying him.

Feynril curled up next to Anders, who pressed his lips to the top of his head as he slowly drifted off to sleep. Anders pulled his blanket up over both of them, and stroked Feynriel's spine gently as he snored softly.

_* * * *_

The Emerald Graves were home to ancient horrors. Layered on top of the elven ruins were Chantry ruins, tangible echoes of the Exalted Marches of ancient days. Anders thought he'd known the depths of the horrors the Chantry was capable of, but he'd barely scratched the surface, so focused had he been on the mage underground in Kirkwall and his own rebellious escapes in the years before that. He looked to his half-elven companion, wondering what Feynriel thought about all this.

Feynriel had never been particularly outspoken about the mages' cause, back in Kirkwall. But now that Anders thought about it, the boy had been living the revolution, a lifelong apostate hidden from the templars by his mother, as Callin had been, and then running away to the Dalish rather than letting the Circle take him. Yes, they owed the renegade templar Thrask a great deal.

Anders squeezed Feynriel's hand as he stood dumbfounded in front a broken marble pillar. He though he could feel the echoes of the elven blood spilled here, generations ago. He could definitely feel the thinness of the Veil.

“Come on,” Feynriel finally said, pulling him back. “Let's keep moving.”

Anders nodded. He kept hearing voices, though they had seen nothing and no one living except for wild animals scavenging through the underbrush: squirrels and nugs that darted away as soon as the humans' footsteps became audible.

 _Help me_ , the wind whispered through the trees. Anders tried as hard as he could to turn his back on it. He followed carefully in Feynriel's footsteps. He didn't ask if Feynriel could hear it too.

They found partial shelter in an old Orlesian estate, all freshly painted blue and white brick, and wrought iron fences. It stood out so starkly against the landscape. It was obvious it didn't belong.

Anders pushed his way ahead of Feynriel, steering the younger man away from the looming front door and toward the back, where there would surely be a kitchen entrance. Sure enough, a much simpler wooden door half-covered with sprawling ivory stood at the back of the house. Anders tested the door, but found it locked. It was a simple thing to melt the lock with a fire spell and push the door open.

Inside, the smell of rot and animal feces was chokingly overwhelming. Anders covered his mouth and nose with the front of his shirt, taking a few careful breaths until he acclimated. The smell wasn't too different from the sewers of Kirkwall, after all. He glanced at Feynriel out of the corner of his eye. The half-elf was remaining stoic. Anders looked around. There were a few dead animals in various stages of decomposition, but no sign of any humans or elves, alive or dead. Thank the Maker. There was nothing of value in the kitchen, not that Anders would've taken anything even if it was there to be taken. The entire place was haunting, or haunted. At the very least, the silence spoke of a need for reverence.

Anders pushed open the door on the opposite side of the kitchen, which led to a short hall scattered with yet more doors. He continued on, opening the door just in front of him. Behind the door he found a room dominated by a large dining table. The cloth on the chairs was moth-eaten, and both table and chairs were covered by a blanket of dust. A cabinet full of fine china, protected by the glass windows inset into the door, stood in the far corner of the room. Anders shut the door behind him, without waiting for Feynriel's response.

The walk through the estate was eerie. The whole place was obviously abandoned, but at points it seemed like, except for the layers of dust, the people who had once lived here could have just up and left an hour ago, and may still be living out there, somewhere. Anders whispered just to break the oppressive quiet. Feynriel shot him a concerned look, and he stopped immediately.

When they came to the end of the short hall (which also included a study stuffed with old books and papers, nearly all of them written in Orlesian, and a pompous sitting room full of stuffed armchairs and tiny tables adorned with gold), the space opened out into a main entrance hall. A grand flight of stairs leading up was nearly wide enough for a horse-drawn carriage to charge up that staircase. Anders waited for Feynriel to catch up, and then looked a question at him. But Feynriel shook his head, confirming his suspicion that up wasn't the direction they needed to go.

Anders took a deep breath and quested out with his magical senses, wondering as he did so if there was even any point in looking for a magical signature from a dead eluvian. Still, there was _some_ kind of resonance in here. And it made too much sense that the Orlesians who had taken over this land, both during and after the Exalted Marches, would've stolen any valuable elven relic they could find.

“How much do you know about the history of the Dalish?” he asked Feynriel as they walked.

The boy shrugged. “Not nearly enough. I'm not... I wasn't a Keeper, or even her First. I'm just a refugee.”

Anders nodded. “Yeah, okay.” He couldn't really be disappointed. He was the same.

The elves he'd known in the Circle came from Ferelden's alienages. The first Dalish he'd met was in Amaranthine, with the Wardens, and she had been incredibly hostile toward him and all humans.

“I think it's this way,” Feynriel said quietly. They had left the open entranceway behind and found another short hall with doors on all three sides. Feynriel turned a sharp right, and the door he pushed open revealed a room crammed full with old stuff. Some of it was stored in carefully stacked crates, but other things seemed to have just been thrown in at random.

And there, in the far corner of the windowless room, a broken mirror. A broken mirror that radiated magic, even in its dormant state. Anders shivered, taking one step forward, and then another. He felt Feynriel's fingers brush over his hand. He'd seen one of these things in Merrill's house, and he knew it required blood magic to wake it up.

“Feynriel,” he said, struggling to keep his voice level. “What happens when you touch it?”

Feynriel took a step forward, looked at Anders over his shoulder, and then pressed his hand to the center of the mirror. Nothing seemed to happen. Anders raised an eyebrow. Feynriel bowed his head and closed his eyes. He didn't exactly go to sleep, but he did fall into a magical trance. Anders stood behind him and held him steady, making sure he didn't fall. After a moment's thought, the healer laid Feynriel on the ground. Anders kept watch over him, holding a vial of lyrium wrapped in his hand, just in case it looked like Feynriel might need it.

After only a few moments, Feynriel's eyelids fluttered open. “I was there,” he gasped, face flush with excitement. “Oh, Anders, you need to see it!”

Anders couldn't help but smile at the other man's enthusiasm. “Okay, okay,” he said, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I want to.”

Feynriel guided him. They would use the eluvian itself as the tether between them. Anders swallowed his vial of lyrium and closed his eyes. He made sure his fingers remained entwined with Feynriel's. He felt the warmth of the young man's skin even when he opened his eyes to the green-gold dreamscape of the Fade.

Anders and Feynriel were both all too well aware of the ever-present danger of being trapped forever in the Fade. They needed to use the eluvian not just as a tether between themselves, but also as an anchor back to their own time and reality. “Don't let go,” Feyriel whispered, and Anders nodded.

The world seemed to form itself around him, as it always did in the Fade. Colors grew more saturated, objects grew more permanent, and sounds grew louder and more identifiable as coming from certain sources rather than a generally overwhelming rush of wind.

There were people, ghosts or spirits, but they _looked_ solid, and they were living and working in something that resembled the Dalish camps Anders had seen, but instead of the aravels ringing the camp, there were solid buildings. These elves had built something lasting, something meant to stay.

In the stories, the elves of ancient Arlathan lived forever. None of the adult elves Anders saw scattered through the camp looked older than middle age, but he knew that was only an illusion. One man, surrounded by a group of young boys, worked with the living wood that grew in the forests all around them. The magical material was plentiful here. Anders could see it in everything from weapons to musical instruments, just in one quick scan.

Feynriel's hand was still wrapped in his. Anders was afraid to let go, though Feynriel had indicated that they didn't have to be physically touching in order to stay connected. An emotional tether would be more than strong enough to make sure they didn't get separated.

“Look,” Feynriel whispered, nodding to their right. A group of elven men slept at the base of a large tree, and three black wolves – one for each of them – rested at their feet. One caught sight of Feynriel and Anders watching them, and his lifted his head and howled, low and long. The men immediately stirred to life, drawing weapons and ready to follow their wolves into battle. But when they saw Feynriel, they relaxed.

“'Tis one of the Dreamers,” the man told his wolf, petting his head with long strokes of his hand. “Quiet yourself.”

“They can see us,” Feynriel hissed, sounding strained. Anders just shrugged.

“Good. If they can hear us, too, we can ask 'em questions.”

Feynriel nodded, but he made no move to actually do so. It was as if he were afraid that all this would disappear if he made the wrong move – or _any_ move.

Anders sucked in a breath as he saw a couple of adolescents practicing battle magic. Both of them had long scars carved into their arms. The telltale sign of blood magic, worn out in the open, disturbed him more than he wanted to admit. But blood magic was the first magic, the fuel behind the power of the elves. He could feel the Fade swirling around him, responding to the clear call.

Anders watched, as one of the elven boys called a sword into being, a weapon made of the shimmering Fade itself, given form.

This was magic like nothing he had ever seen – magic with no limiters, no templars waiting to shut it down. Why weren't these children – _blood mages_ – vulnerable to possession?

This wasn't quite the beginning of magic, but it was something close. It was power before fear had crushed it down. It was balance, harmony with nature. And it was sacrifice, giving to get something in return.

Was it _possible_ to use blood magic without attracting demons?

“Do you feel it?” Anders asked Feynriel. The young man just raised an eybrow and frowned in confusion, uncertain of what 'it' Anders was referring to. “Magic,” Anders attempted to clarify. “It's everywhere.”

“Because we're in the Fade,” Feynriel said. That should have been obvious, shouldn't it?

But Anders only shook his head. “It's more than that. It's... when this was real, Arlathan, magic was everywhere.”

And over the centuries, the Chantry squeezed it out, until finally the Conclave and the Breach had sealed it off completely. Well, that was one way to end the generations-long war between mages and templars.

“We're here,” Anders murmured, still in awe. “Now we have to get what we came for.”

* * * *

For all the times that she had been to visit Dorian in his big house on the hill, Lexa had never gone exploring in his neighborhood. She longed to run out into the wide, paved streets to play, but Dorian kept a much closer eye on her now than he ever had in the past. He was worried, and though he wouldn't say why, Lexa understood that it had to do with the restless riots brewing to life more and more frequently in the soporati sections of the city. He was less easily threatened than many of the magisters, but even so, he had taken to locking himself into his estate more days than not, along with screening his visitors and his mail. He no longer had to worry only about assassins sent by his fellows in the Magisterium; there were also plenty of soporati who were calling for the blood of the altus above them.

“Freedom will never be voluntarily given by the oppressor, Dorian,” Maevaris said, clucking her tongue from behind her cup of tea. She glanced at Lexa out of the corner of her eye, then back to Dorian, as if asking him if she should really speak freely with a little girl in the room, but Dorian just shrugged. Lexa had sat in the background of plenty of war councils in her short life. “These soporati insurrections are putting pressure on the Magisterium. Surely some of them can be won over to our side, if only out of fear.”

“The magisters I know will only cling to their power more stubbornly. They'll refuse to capitulate.”

“Can you blame them?”

Dorian shook his head, then winced as he saw Maevaris rubbing her own forehead, massaging away what he knew was an intense headache. Their difficulties with magic were getting worse, not better. “If you'll excuse me,” he said smoothly to Maeve. She bowed her head forward in a nod.

“I'll see you tomorrow, Dorian,” she said gently, before sweeping out of the room.

Lexa looked at Dorian with noticable concern. “I can help,” she told him. “I know how to make elfroot potion.”

Dorian raised an eyebrow, but he supposed that if Anders and Feynriel couldn't find the solution they hoped for in Orlais, he might have to get used to a world where magical healing was not readily available. His head was pounding, pain spiking through him with every beat of his heart. The world spun, and he took a few unsteady steps until he was close enough to his chair to collapse into it.

Lexa crossed her arms over her chest and gave him a stubborn look that reminded Dorian so much of her father that he couldn't help but laugh.

“I know, I know,” he muttered. “I promise to take better care of myself.”

“I'll be back in a little while,” Lexa said. Dorian nodded. He wondered if he should keep a stock of healing herbs in his own garden – he'd gotten used to their easy accessibility in Skyhold, and it would be a simple fix to a problem that wasn't likely to go away any time soon. The elfroot would likely soothe his stomach as well, an effect which would be most welcome.

He sunk back into his chair and willed the headache to go away; predictably, the headache cared little about what he wanted. Dorian fumbled for the bottle of wine he'd brought out to share with Maevaris before they'd shifted to tea. He poured a glass for himself and sipped it slowly, and worried thoughts swirled around in his brain. Tomorrow was the day when he planned to put forth proposals for several major reforms in the Senate: protections for slaves against unnecessarily brutal punishments, restricting the removal of young children from their mothers, and limiting the importing of slaves from other lands. If even one of those measures passed, it might be seen as a gesture of goodwill by those men and women, few in number but growing louder and increasingly violent, who argued for the total abolition of slavery.

* * * *

The autumn sunlight streamed through the awnings above Lexa's head, casting long shadows. She weaved her way through the twisting alleyways of Minrathous, but the familiar streets felt foreign. Many of the shops and stalls where her neighbors sold their wares were shuttered now, forced to close as the altus circled the wagons and relied on their own sources of merchandise rather than venturing out to soporati shops. The raised taxes and rents on the store buildings had driven many out of business. Some families supported one another in a makeshift barter economy, but food was one thing most of these city-dwellers couldn't produce on their own, and even if they had the green space and the know-how, it was the wrong season for growing things.

It seemed like there were fewer children on the streets, and the few that Lexa saw were huddled in the dark entrances to the alleys, or streaking away from the Minrathous Guard with stolen scraps of food in their hands. Lexa longed to find one of her friends, but the truth was that many of the neighborhood children had been pulling away from her ever since she had begun spending more and more of her time with Dorian. Battle lines were being drawn, the entire city taking sides against one another.

She made her way through the narrow side streets until she came to her father's clinic. The lantern which always shown bright in the window was blown out, after all, her father had been gone for days. The door was locked, but she knew how to open it, and once it was unlocked she pushed it hard until there was enough space for her to slip into the large, low-ceilinged room. Though the sun had not yet finished setting outside, it was already dark in the clinic. Lexa stood just inside the doorway as she waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. She jumped as something brushed against her leg, but it was only Alley. She reached down to pet the cat, who meowed happily and bumped her head up against Lexa's hand.

Lexa hadn't brought Alley any food, but she went over to the cabinet where her father kept theirs. It was mostly empty, as expected, but she found a few hard biscuits and threw one to the cat. Alley began gnawing at the tough treat, meowing loudly every now and then. With the cat now distracted, Lexa headed for her true destination, the shelves where Anders kept his potions and healing herbs. Uncertain of which ones would help Dorian, she grabbed some of everything and tossed them into her bag, making certain the stoppers were plugged tight into their vials so nothing would spill. She was just about to leave, locking the door behind her, when an elf dropped down from the roof and landed right in front of her.

Lexa frowned. “Amaya?” she asked tentatively.

“I need your help,” the older girl pleaded.

Lexa nodded, agreeing to help before she even knew what Amaya needed, even though she knew it was probably dangerous. Well, she got that from her father. Dorian would be worried, though. Oh well, she told herself. Whatever it was, she'd be careful.


End file.
